Well it's good to see that not long after the launch of a new high-end product a company has come out and mixed it up a bit. While it's not uncommon for us to see higher end ATI boards make this transition quickly, so it seems that NVIDIA partners tend to take longer or sometimes not even bother at all. Of course, it doesn't help with the obscure PCB design on some of the cards like the GeForce GTX 295, fingers crossed that the rumors of a new single PCB dual GPU card is true. What we have with us is a GeForce GTX 285 which in the looks department manages to stand out from the pack. If that wasn't enough, Galaxy thought they would also take the time to strap on 2GB of memory at once. - TweakTown

Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 2GB Tri-Fan Xtreme Review

Checking out the box, we don't notice anything we haven't seen before with the same box design being used. The only difference is of course the stickers that Galaxy place on the box which let us differentiate the models. Across the top we have the Galaxy logo while the bottom right corner has a few NVIDIA logos. The middle of their box has an Xtreme Tuner sticker which lets us know that this software is included in the package. What this lets us do is overclock the board so that we can get a bit of extra performance out of it. Below that we can also see the model, in this case the GeForce GTX 285 graphics card with PhysX.

Looking at the card for the first time, there isn't a whole lot to see here thanks to the Arctic Xtreme cooler that Galaxy has opted for. It pretty much covers every inch of the board with us only really seeing three 92mm fans that span from one end of the graphics card to the other. There's more to the cooler than just a few fans, though. We've got five heatpipes that run under them to help move the heat away from the core and we have a huge number of aluminum fins. With the help of the fans the heat then gets taken off the card as quickly as possible. Once again you can run three of these cards together in a 3-way SLI configuration.

As far as specs go, there are two major changes in this GeForce GTX 285 from Galaxy. So the first is the massive 2GB of memory they have chosen to include. The second is the memory clock, they have used slightly slower memory so they have had to decrease the clock to 2400MHz effective. And apart from these two changes everything else is stock, which means the core comes in at 648MHz while the shader clock is 1476MHz. With the massive cooler on offer and their down clock in memory, it would have been nice to see Galaxy increase the core, but instead they have opted for something that should run quieter and cooler.

The only thing bigger than the amount of memory on the 2GB powered GeForce GTX 285 from Galaxy is the cooler which doesn't just look good, but offers some seriously low numbers in the cooling department without the cost of extra noise. The only real gripe we have with the card is the clocks. While we can understand that the memory speed had to be dropped to get 2GB of GDDR3 memory on the card, it would have been nice to see Galaxy increase the core to help combat the lower clock speeds. Now this might not sound as the best approach though is somehow logic when you are putting that much of frame buffer on a single card.

Considering the cooling power of the Arctic Xtreme and the numbers we're seeing in both the temperature and noise departments, this extra performance should have come at no real extra cost. With that said though, Galaxy has of course included its own Xtreme Tuner software that gives you the ability to crank up the speeds of your card. It's not hard or that time consuming to get the core speed up and some extra frames which would help us see the lead over the GeForce GTX 275 increase by more than the ten percent average we are seeing at the moment, which does give this solution a great added value.

This Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 2GB edition with Arctic Xtreme cooling really is a great video card that packs some serious punch. If you're not only looking for the quietest GeForce GTX 285 we have checked to date, but also the coolest, then this is simply a fantastic option.