GeForce GTX 275 Roundup (Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Sparkle, BFG)

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Considering nearly every card in this roundup has the same heatsink, we got exactly what we were expecting with the temperatures staying pretty much even. Out of the “stock” cards there was one standout: Gigabyte. They claimed that their Ultra Durable VGA technology would mean lower temperatures. Unfortunately, this wasn’t meant to be as the fan was set to start spinning up when the core hit 88*C which is exactly what all the other card were set at as well. One way or another, all of the card here were blissfully quiet.

MSI’s Twin Frozr proved to be a true wolf among the sheep. The temperatures it displayed were nothing short of incredible considering the heat generated by the core on the GTX 275. Add to that a near-silent running experience and we can say that MSI completely hit the nail on the head with their custom cooler.