Before we jump into the action, a quick overview of the company Galaxy:

"Established since 1994, GALAXY Technology is dedicated in the manufacturing and distribution of quality computer components. Head office in Hong Kong and factory located in China, this combination of business structure offers us the very competitive edge. It combines all the advantage of technology vision, technology know-how, and the cost competitiveness of production in China.

VGA card manufacturing is our prime business. After years of establishment, business is growing solidly and stably, with quality to be our No.1 priority, our products can meet the most demanding OEM requirement.And we believe in Win-Win, customer's growth and profitability is our key concern, that is how we establish our strong foot hold from the years of OEM manufacturing with our partners.
Vision to grow

Business growth is enormous, in early 2000, we have taken major step to further expand market by launching our brands of NVIDIA line VGA card - Glacier and Zeus. The encouraging result and feedback from customers has confirmed our strategy to fully explore Glacier and Zues brands and distribution. Growth of business do not stop at computer card manufacturing, in parallel with our long years of exposure in computer field, it gained us extensive networks in Hong Kong, SouthEast Asia, USA, Europe and China."

Previous reviews and articles containing Galaxy video cards:

Geforce 9500 GT SLI vs Geforce 9600 GT Performance Comparison

Galaxy and Leadtek 9500 GT Tested and Compared

TwinTech and Vvikoo overclocked 9600GT, 5-way roundup

LN2 Cooled Galaxy 9600 GT Breaks World 3D Records

Modified Galaxy 9600 GT Breaks World Records

Galaxy 9600 GT 512MB OC Video Card Review

Galaxy 8600GE Overclocking Experience [OCTB]

Galaxy 8600Ge Video Card Overclocking Review

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We have had this out-of-the-box overclocked 9500GT for a while now, over 7 months to be more precise, but every time we thought of overclocking this card something came in between. Last weekend, however, we did find the time to work on this little overclocking article!

Before we begin, let's have a look at the conclusion in our review:

"Looking at the card, it seems that Galaxy did a good job designing their own PCB. The higher clock frequencies do pay off, making the card faster than its direct competitor and in contrary to what we would expect; the card doesn't have any higher level of temperature or power consumption. Another eye-catcher is the card being a bit shorter, which suits the idea of a low-end card. The extra power connector should help when overclocking, especially when increasing the voltage. Speaking of which, both cards still run at reference voltages, which is 1,1v and should thus give a good headroom if you are interested in voltage modifications."
(~ Galaxy and Leadtek 9500 GT Tested and Compared)

Now, we fired up our Core i7 test setup and later in the overclocking session the Mach2 Single Stage cooling unit to accompany this card to break a few world records.

Test setup

Madshrimps' X58 Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core i7 965 (click for picture)
Cooling	Noctua NH-U12P nVentic Mach2 cooling unit
Mainboard	Foxconn Bloodrage
Memory	3 * 2GB OCZ Reaper PC-14400
Other	Galaxy OC 9500GT Antec 1000W PSU Western Digital 320Gb SATA HDD Western Digital 500Gb SATA HDD Windows XP SP3 32-bit Windows Vista SP1 64-bit OCZ Freeze thermal paste

Special thanks to: TONES

Before we continue we like to thank Tones (www.tones.be) for their continued support, with their help Madshrimps is able to give you articles with the latest high-end hardware. If you live in Belgium, check out their online store for sharp prices, quick delivery and excellent support:

Voltage modifications:

In our first overclocking session, we were able to take the card upto 750/1800/1134MHz, which is not bad, but far from good enough to play a role in the top of the 9500GT overclocking rankings over at Hwbot. So, we were in need of extra voltage to be able to increase the frequencies without the card getting unstable.

Before we present you the voltage modifications of the Galaxy OC 9500GT, we want to stress that Madshrimps is not responsible for your actions. If you want to modify the videocard, please know what you're doing!

Check out our soldering guide for some useful tips!

First, the voltage modification for the GPU core:



To increase the voltage, solder a 50k ohm variable resistor between the red and green dot. In this case, the red dot on the voltage controller (Nexsem 2423DS (PDF)) the FB pin. However, please use the alternative soldering point which is also marked by a red dot. The green dot is a soldering point to ground. You can either use this point or any other ground on the card.

Second, the voltage modification for the memory:



Again, you have to solder a 50k ohm variable resistor between FB (red) and ground (green). For reference, here's the PDF file of the voltage controller: Richtek 9259A (PDF).

Last, the voltage measurement points:

Red dot: Vgpu measurement point
Green dot: Vmem measurement point

Overclocking results:

We present our overclocking scaling results in a different manner than we normally do. As you know, we very much like to graph the actual scaling in terms of performance or overclockability using an extensive series of tests from a more scientific point of view. However, this time we opted for a very small comparison of four stages of the overclocking proces:

C2D - Stock

Ci7 - Stock

Ci7 - OC

Ci7 - Voltage increase

The Core 2 Duo results you’ll see is the same data we used in our 9500GT review a few months ago. Although this means that they are not entirely comparable, we wanted to give them anyway for to see how it compares to the more recent Core i7 setup. Obviously, the i7 is a winner in the 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage benchmarks, due to the 4 cores and hyper threading technology.

Below you find a table of the clock frequencies used in the different test cases. Note that the frequencies can be a little bit higher or lower depending on what benchmark we were running; after all, 3DMark06 stresses the video card more than others, like Aquamark3.



On stock voltage, we were able to push the Galaxy to 750/1800/1134Mhz without too much trouble, but to go further up, we were in need of voltage modifications. At first, we only modified the Vgpu, since 1.1GHz memory frequency is more than enough to feed the video card (which is limited by the core and shader clocks). However, as we more or less expected, we were unable to clock the memory up to 1.1GHz anymore after we increase the Vgpu to 1.35v. Even at the stock frequency of 1GHz, we found the card to be very unstable! This is a known issue with a lot of Gefore 9 series products: when increasing the Vgpu (and GPU frequencies), you need to increase the memory voltage to keep the card stable. Once we increase the memory voltage to 2.1v, we were again able to run at 1.13GHz.

Since we have no other cooling solution available than the Galaxy stock cooling, we did experience heat issues above 1.45v. However, at 1.45v, we had almost no heat issues, which is very impressive for just stock cooling! Let's have a look at the scores:





For reference, here are the links to the final scores:

3DMark01: 65200 - 3rd

3DMark03: 29234 - 2nd

3DMark05: 18727 - 1st

3DMark06: 9521 - 2nd

3DMark Vantage: 3595 - 1st

Aquamark 3: 233037 - 3rd

As you can see, we managed to hit top3 in each benchmark only using the stock cooling, which makes us wonder what will happen when we bring out the LN2, that’s a story for later on :-)

Overclocking too far: artifacts

While overclocking to the brink of stability does lead to impressive scores, it doesn’t mean your system is usable at those speeds, to illustrate this, take a look at the following two recordings made during the bench session; if you are into flashy colors, overclocking your VGA could be your thing ;-)





Conclusive thoughts

Without doubt, the Galaxy OC 9500GT is capable of breaking any 9500GT world record. The extra voltage seems to be quite effective, although we need to make a sidenote regarding the memory voltage, which definitely has to be increased if you're increasing the voltage of the gpu. Up till 1.45v Vgpu, we notice that the video card’s frequencies scale pretty good, but beyond 1.45v, you will be needing better cooling to keep temperaturesd down. We noticed that the temperature was very much limiting the shader clock frequency as we were stuck at around 2.1GHz (stable), whereas other overclockers using a water-cooling setup seem to be able to hit 2.3GHz.

To end with, I'd like to thank:

Igor for the Galaxy OC 9500GT from Galaxy

Maurice for the Bloodrage from Foxconn

Manu for the Core i7 965 from Tones

Tobias from OCZ for the package of OCZ Freeze

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I hope you enjoyed reading this OC report, until next time, click the banner below to read up on our previous overclocking endeavors: