Overclocking Galaxy’s GTX 750 Ti GC Slim without Limits

This evaluation focuses primarily on the performance of the Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC Slim as it relates to the reference GTX 750 Ti which we reviewed last month.  The GTX 750 series are brand-new entry-level GM107 Maxwell architecture on 28nm, which bring incredible efficiency coupled with very good performance.

Galaxy Slim, left; reference GTX 750 Ti, right

We will compare performance to price as the reference and overclocked GTX 750 Tis are priced $159 at Newegg, while the GTX 750 Ti GC Slim also sells for $159 including a free low profile bracket from the Galaxy Store.  In fact, the Galaxy GTX 750 Ti Slim is the only low profile Maxwell card available which makes it perfect for  use as a low-power gaming card for slim cases and for home theater PCs (HTPC). Besides comparing the Galaxy Slim at Galaxy factory clocks (GC) with the reference GTX 750 Ti, we will also overclock it further using the very latest WHQL drivers to remove the clock lock, mod the BIOS to remove the TPD limitation, and expand on using the GTX 750 Ti as the ideal stand-alone dedicated PhysX card, by pairing two GTX 750 Tis with each other.

The Galaxy GTX 750 Ti Slim’s Competition – the missing in action R7 265 – and Crypto-mining

Nearly a month ago, AMD paper-launched the R7 265 which should be faster than the GTX 750 Ti at a MSRP of $149.  Finally, last Thursday, a single SKU of the Sapphire R7 265 briefly appeared at Newegg only to sell out within a few minutes and before ABT could purchase it for benching.  Evidently it has not made an appearance at any other North American etailer/retailer since launch which only leaves the slower-than-the GTX 750 Ti, 2GB R7 260X, which costs from $139-$159 at Newegg, to compete on price with the GTX 750 Ti.

Even if the R7 265 makes it into general release, it is likely that there may be issues with AMD’s being unable to hold pricing on the R7 265 at $149.  Basically R7 265 is a slightly faster Pitcarin HD 7850-2GB (or a cut down R9 270) which already commands a premium and sells for up to $200 at US etailers due to its ability to mine alternate crypto-currency like LiteCoin.  The R7 265 also has a board power of 150W, well above the 60W of the GTX 750 Ti.

The R7 260X is not as desired a mining card in about the same performance class as an overclocked HD 7790, and it has already had its price adjusted downward to around $129 at Newegg while the overclocked HD 7770s and HD 7790s still sit in the $110-120 range along with the 260-nonX.  ABT recommended the PowerColor R9 270X which launched originally at $199 as a good value, while now it easily commands a $40-100 price premium due to its demand as a mining card.  Because of mining demands, the R9 270X is in the same $250 price range as the faster GTX 760.

SiSoft’s latest Sandra “GPGPU Crypto” benchmark indicates that Maxwell scores far higher than Kepler, perhaps due to more registers per SM and other architectural changes.  It appears that the GTX 750 Ti may also be desirable as a mining card and we are interested to see if miners will buy them in large quantities and/or if Nvidia can hold the price on its partners’ GTX 750 Ti cards since AMD is unable to control pricing with its partner cards.

In our original evaluation, we compared the reference GTX 750 Ti to the Sapphire factory overclocked Vapor-X HD 7770 which it demolished, as well as to Nvidia’s last generation, the GTX 650 Ti which it replaced as significantly faster, and also to AMD’s faster and more expensive ($200 plus) R7 270X. We also compared the new GTX 750 Ti to the GTX 480 to get an overall idea of the new GTX 750 Ti performance stock and overclocked compared with the Fermi flagship of less than 4 years ago, and it did quite well.  And of course, we placed the GTX 750 Ti into a performance hierarchy all the way up to the R9 290X and the GTX 780 Ti.  This evaluation uses the same WHQL drivers and focuses on the Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC Slim at several stages of overclock including with the TDP limitation removed by a BIOS mod.

We will still use our Core i7-4770K at 4.0GHz which equalizes very well to our previous Ivy Bridge benches with Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz.  We use 2x8GB of super-fast Kingston HyperX “Beast” DDR3 at 2133MHz in an ECS flagship Z87 “Golden” motherboard.

Let’s unbox and then test our Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC Slim after we check out its features and specifications.