GALAXY MDT GeForce GT520 Pro Reviews

Galaxy continues its climb upward in the graphics card market by developing unique and innovative solutions around NVIDIA GPUs. The MDT series (multiple display technology) not only helps NVIDIA compete with AMD's feature set in the high-end market but also allows Galaxy to sell a card like the MDT GeForce GT 520 for a reasonable price, offering support for up to four monitors for multi-tasking consumers and businesses. The only thing that would have us recommend this product any higher would be a lower price, getting closer to the rest of the field in terms of graphical capability. For anyone that is looking to expand to an extreme level of screen real estate with a moderate level of gaming horsepower, the Galaxy MDT GeForce GT 520 is a great solution.

The Galaxy MDT GeForce GT 520 is certainly a unique product in the sense that it does what no other GT 520 can: support up to four monitors. Standard cards are limited to just two monitors, as is the case with all GeForce 500 series (and earlier) cards. Truth be told, Nvidia's multi-monitor technology is a little lacking, as it requires two cards in SLI to drive three monitors. By comparison, AMD Eyefinity can support three displays with a single card, while certain high-end cards can power up to half a dozen monitors. This presents a challenge for Galaxy's product, as we can't help but feel those wanting to utilize four monitors for non-gaming purposes would be better off with an Eyefinity-capable graphics card such as the Radeon HD 6450. Additionally, cards with a DisplayPort 1.2 connector can in fact drive up to four separate monitors. Using a Multi-Stream compatible hub with DP1.2 capable monitors it is possible to connect four screens to a single DisplayPort connector. We know of HD 6450 cards from HIS and Sapphire that feature a DisplayPort 1.2 connector and can therefore support four displays.

The Galaxy GT 520 MDT was released in April of 2011 as the lowest-cost DX11 GPU in the Fermi-based product stack from NVIDIA. As such, it comes with all of the characteristics and capabilities of the Fermi family of GPUs. This includes support for Stereoscopic 3D, low overhead video playback and GPU acceleration of a slew of applications. Gaming performance is decidedly low-end and is more for the casual game, although high FPS DX11 games can be played at low settings at up to 1280x1024. Most games will need to be played at even lower resolutions. Overclocking does improve gaming performance, however, as I was able to push the clock speeds on this card to 1000MHz on the core and up to a mere 618MHz on the GDDR3 memory. Both are 20% or better improvements and did offer measurable gains in performance. The real benefit of this card from Galaxy is the ability to use up to four 1080p DVI monitors. This feat was not possible with run-of-the-mill Fermi based video cards since they are limited to two monitors from one card. Using Galaxy's MDT EZY software allows the end user to configure the displays in either split mode where each display has a desktop interface or merged mode where the display is spanned across multiple screens. The software is used in combination with the resolution settings in the operating system to get the optimal resolution for each display. The software is easy to use with little resource overhead. A gaming card it is not, but as a unique addition to the GT 520 line up, the GT 520 MDT from Galaxy offers a low-cost way to create a lot of desktop real estate.