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GTX 260+ Lives!!

If you stopped by here looking for the Lucid HYDRA performance preview, click here to reach it.  The incoming linker had a typo!

Introduction

Yeah, I thought we were done with new GeForce GTX 260+ reviews as well, but sometimes things change.  In this case, what has changed is the form factor, and in an impressive way.  Galaxy has been making what seems to be all the right moves in the world of NVIDIA graphics cards coming out with overclocked and custom cooled cards over the past year that have impressed us.  When they told us they had a new GTX 260+ model to review, I was convinced to take the card until they mentioned it was a single slot design – a first for air cooled offerings.

The Galaxy GeForce GTX 260+ Razor

The Galaxy GTX 260+ Razor gets its name from its slim appearance – though not quite razor thin it is the first single slot design we have seen on an air-cooled GTX 260+.  The style on the card is definitely nice as well combining a copper heatsink with a painted grey aluminum casing and a fairly high speed fan.


The external connections include only a single dual-link DVI connection, and HDMI port and a TV output as well.  I am sure that the lack of dual DVI outputs will be a bit disappointing to some enthusiasts looking for dual monitor configurations – keep in mind that there are HDMI-to-DVI adaptors for secondary monitors but they are limited to 1920x1200 resolution screen.


This is still a GTX 260+ and thus requires a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connections.  We did notice that the aluminum shell on the card did make installing the power cables from our PC Power and Cooling 1200 watt power supply a bit annoying – the clips didn’t want to easily go under the aluminum.


As you might imagine, the fan on the Galaxy GTX 260+ Razor has to spin pretty fast to keep the GPU cool enough to run in a single slot design and so it can get noisy when gaming but is otherwise reasonable in sound levels at idle. 


The back of the card is bare – no memory chips or anything on the back here.


You can see the pair of SLI connections as well for SLI and 3-Way SLI support.


Here you can see the big deal for the Galaxy Razor edition GTX 260+ - the size.  The standard GTX 260+ is a dual slot beast of a card and the new cooler designed by Galaxy will allow the card to fit in a lot more places including smaller HTPC cases with sufficient cooling.

Click here for the Detailed Review