Galaxy’s GTX 760 GC Mini – overclocking in a small package

Galaxy has just released their overclocked GTX 760 GC Mini video card that is proving to be very interesting. Although it is built on the GTX 760 reference PCB, it takes up 25% less space making it an ideal card for use as a gaming card for slim cases and for home theater PCs (HTPC). Although it is small in size, it boasts a 4+2 phase power delivery which should allow it to overclock beyond the +49MHz of its Galaxy factory overclock.

This evaluation focuses primarily on the performance of the Galaxy GTX 760 GC Mini as it relates to the reference GTX 760 as well as to other cards in the GeForce line-up and to their Radeon counterparts. The GTX 760 series are GK104 Kepler architecture on 28nm, which brings efficiency coupled with very good performance.

The Galaxy GTX 760 GC Mini’s Competition – the R9 270X

We will compare performance to price as the reference and overclocked GTX 760s are generally priced starting at $249 at Newegg, while the GTX 760 GC Mini sells for $264.99 from the Galaxy Store which puts it in the middle of the overclocked GTX 760s price-wise.

Besides comparing the Galaxy Mini at Galaxy factory clocks (GC) with the reference GTX 760, we will also overclock it further using the very latest GeForce Beta 337.50 drivers. We shall also compare it with the overclocked PowerColor R9 270X which is finally back in the $220 price range.

Nvidia is offering the upcoming game, Daylight, which is the first Unreal Engine 4 game bundled with most GTX 760s sold at retail, including with the Galaxy GTX 760 GC Mini from the Galaxy Store. The game releases on April 29 and we expect to have an ABT performance evaluation of it shortly afterward.

Currently the PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ is bundled with AMD’s Silver bundle which includes a choice of two games from the Never Settle Bundle.

We will still use our Core i7-4770K at 4.0GHz which equalizes very well in performance 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 760 GC Mini after we check out its features and specifications.