Galaxy’s GTX 770 Hall of Fame edition benchmarked

Galaxy has pulled out all of the stops in producing what they hope will be the go-to lineup for factory overclocked GeForce GTX 770s and GTX 780s with their handpicked GPUs and specially-engineered Hall of Fame (HOF) all-white video cards.

This evaluation will focus primarily on the performance of the Galaxy GTX 770 HOF as it relates to the reference GTX 770 and to the EVGA GTX 770 SC 4GB card that we reviewed last month. We will compare performance and price as the HOF sells for $449 and the SC for $459. We received a Galaxy GTX 770 Hall of Fame video card from Galaxy, and for the past week, we have also been comparing it to the AMD Radeon HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds.

The Factory overclocked Galaxy GTX 770 HOF’s Competition – the HD 7970 GHz Edition and other overclocked GTX 770s

This time, Galaxy is aiming to produce the very fastest factory overclocked GTX 770 with a core speed of 1202MHz, well above the stock reference settings of 1046MHz, and 91MHz above the 1111MHz core factory overclock of the EVGA’s SC GTX 770. This evaluation will showcase the Galaxy-overclocked GTX 770 HOF at its factory clocks, and also further overclocked by us.

Besides comparing the Galaxy GTX 770 HOF with the HD 7970 GHz edition, an important comparison might be made with the $10 more expensive EVGA GTX 770 SC 4GB card which is currently selling for $459. Both of these cards are bundled with a key for the not-yet-released copy of Batman: Arkham Origins.  The HD 7970 GHz edition can be purchased for as little as $375, or for overclocked versions to about $450, with a flexible 3-game bundle.

Here are some USA pricing comparisons of various GTX 770 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz editions:

• Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition – $375.00-$450.00
• Reference GeForce GTX 770 2GB – $389.99-$410.00
• EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SC 2GB – $409.99
• Galaxy GeForce GTX 770 HOF 2GB – $449.99
• EVGA GeForce GTX 770 SC 4GB – $459.99

Currently the Galaxy GTX 770 HOF 2GB version is $449.99 at Amazon. It is currently out of stock at Newegg. We need to ask, is the Galaxy GTX 770 HOF 2GB worth thirty to fifty dollars more than the reference version, and is it worth about the same as the overclocked HD 7970 GHz Editions or the EVGA GTX 770 C 4GB version? Our last evaluation showed little advantage in gaming of 4GB over 2GB with a single GTX 770 at any resolution, including 5760×1080 at playable settings.

Since we do not want any chance of our CPU “bottlenecking” our graphics, we are testing our graphics cards by using our Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, 8 GB Kingston “Beast” HyperX PC2133 DDR3 and EVGA’s Z77 FTW motherboard on Windows 7.

This EVGA FTW motherboard features 16x + 16x PCIe 3.0 specification for CrossFire/SLI. The Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz is more than enough to differentiate even high-end video cards at high resolution and high detail settings and we test at 1920×1080 and at 5760×1080.

Let’s unbox and then test our Galaxy GTX 770 HOF after we check out its features and specifications.