BFG 9800 GT 512MB ThermoIntelligence Passive Cooling Review

Heat & Acoustics

For the heat test we set up the card on an open test bench with a 120mm 1200RPM fan mounted about 12” away. Ambient room temperature is a constant 22°C.


The 65nm core on this 9800 GT seems to be anything but efficient and as such, the Thermaright heatsink has to work double-time in order to disperse the heat. While the temperatures were recorded were the highest of the bunch, they were still well within the norms considering the small amount of airflow which was present. On the next pages, we will see how this cooler holds up under a bit more extreme conditions.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. Additionally, the whole system was hooked up to a Tripp Lite 1600W Line Conditioner to ensure a constant voltage so fluctuations would not influence out readings


BFG seems to have used slightly more efficient components in the design of their 9800 GT ThermoIntelligence than were used on the reference card. Granted, the elimination of the fan helps somewhat when it comes to power savings but its approximate 3W is negligible. All in all, it is good to see that BFG was able to increase efficiency while not going towards the mythical 55nm 9800 GT core.