Galaxy GeForce GT 440 2GB Review - PAGE 2

The Galaxy GT 440 arrived to our labs in a rectangular box with a predominantly black color scheme and most of the key features listed on the front, like support for PhysX, CUDA along with the model number of the graphics card, included memory capacity and the manufacturer warranty period which happens to be 3 years. The front also shows the PCI interface, and has an label pointing to the back panel asking "Why do you need a graphics card? We have 5 good reasons."

Once the packaging is flipped over, you are instantly greeted with those five reasons. From left to right the reasons are; a better looking Windows OS, "feel the pixels", HD internet video, and of course accelerating your PC and 3D gaming. Each reason has a small excerpt under them explaining why these five features are important.

Te graphics card comes wrapped Inside the box in both an anti-static bag and a cushioned bag for protection. Inside you will also find the bundled goods which consist of a driver/utility disc, and user documentation.

The Galaxy GT 440 based on the same GF108 silicon as the GeForce GT 430, which gives the graphics card native DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0, OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL 1.1 support. In addition, the GPU includes 96 CUDA cores clocked at 1620MHz, and a GPU core clock speed of 810MHz. Turning to the memory, the Galaxy GT 440 sports a 2GB frame buffer that comes clocked at 500MHz (1Gb/sec effective) and runs on a 64-bit memory interface, giving the card a total memory bandwidth of 8GB/s.

The graphics card itself is relatively small, but Galaxy went with a full sized bracket as opposed to using a small form factor. This mean the graphics card is not going to be able to fit into a SFF case. The graphics card also includes a large heatsink on the GPU using a finned design and a centrally mounted propeller fan. We were told this heatsink is extremely efficient and has a decibel range well under that of a traditional CPU heatsink. So, adding this card into a system shouldn't have a noticeable affect on the acoustic level during operation.

The Galaxy GT 440 comes with only two video outputs, which are a standard VGA and DL-DVI connector. This gives the model limited video expansion options, but the DVI port is capable of supporting resolutions up to 2560x1600 and also 3D technology.

Overclocking

To overclock the Galaxy GT 440, we used the Galaxy Xtreme Tuner HD. In our labs we were able to push the GPU clock speed up to 920MHz, which is an increase of 1110MHz over the reference clock. This also increased the CUDA core clock speed to 1840, which is quite good for an entry-level graphics card. The memory also scaled well, but we weren't able to push the frequency up by an additional 100MHz. In the end we maxed the memory out at 572MHz, which is an increase of nearly 15%.

With the clocks set at these frequencies, we should net an additional 10% to 15% performance in comparison to the reference frequencies.