Heat and Acoustics
Unfortunately, things get rather toasty around the GTX 295 since it is more than happy to spew massive amounts of heat back into your case. Even though the two cores idle at more than acceptable temperatures, the real story lies in the Load results. Both cores hit pretty higher temperatures even after a few minutes of load testing. This is expected due to the dual GPU nature of this card but we were somewhat hoping that the temperatures would be a bit more under control.
The temperatures only tell part of the story since the low idle results are brought to you by a fan profile that is far too aggressive. Our EVGA GTX 295 had its fan spinning at a constant 40% at idle which nearly drove me to distraction after a few hours. To make matters even worse, the fan speed increases exponentially as you play a game to the point where you will be looking high and low for some noise cancelling earbuds before long. If you are into silent computing, this card is definitely NOT for you. Heck, if you value your sanity you will want to experiment A LOT with the fan speed control.
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