BFG 9800 GT 512MB ThermoIntelligence Passive Cooling Review

Passive Cooling in an Extreme Environment

Some of you may be wondering: what is extremely passive cooling? Well, for these tests we put the card in a closed case with very little internal airflow.


The case is a GMC Toast which has horrible airflow characteristics to begin with but we kicked things up a notch by installing a pair of Zalman 80mm rear exhaust fans with resistors attached which means they are running at a mere 800RPMs. In addition, there is no front intake fan. We then let the CPU (an AMD 5200+) and GPU work at full load (Prime 95 for the CPU and 3DMark Batch Size Test for the GPU) for an hour with the side panel closed and hope to God nothing fries itself.


In the second test we installed the card into our Gigabyte Aurora 3D case which has airflow that is more typical of many other cases on the market. Basically, it has a front 120mm fan and a pair of rear 120mm fans all operating at 1200RPMs


BFG told us that their passive card needed a good amount of airflow over its cooling assembly in order for it to really shine and they weren’t kidding. With temperatures hovering around the 95°C mark, things were starting to look a bit dicey there but luckily it seemed like the heat stayed at a constant after it reached its peak about 20 minutes into the one hour run. Unfortunately, what this also indicates to me is that BFG is not using the rumored 55nm 9800 GT core we heard about months and months ago. This would have been the perfect opportunity to use it but somewhere along the line it seems Nvidia forgot to ship the chips to partners.

Next up was the testing in a more typical ATX environment and the difference was like night and day. Temperatures were well within the norms and impressively so throughout the test. Personally, I feel that these results are closer to what the average user will experience when running this card passively. All in all, I would say that I was impressed considering a stock 9800 GT’s thermals are quite high when compared to its immediate competition from ATI.