Gigabyte GTX 260 (216SP) 896MB Super Overclock Review

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.


What we did here is a two step approach: first we tested at the Super Overclock’s default speeds and then underclocked the card to the same level as a reference card while fixing both cards’ fan speeds at 40%. This gave us an idea of how much more efficient the Gigabyte card is and it seems like UDV is more than just marketing speak. There is indeed a noticeable difference in load temperatures between the two cards with the Super Overclock coming out on top. However, it should be noted that this could be due to anything from different thermal compound applications to slight variances in the heatsink’s base.

Even at stock fan speeds, this card was remarkably quiet even though the heatsink had to cool down a highly overclocked core. Not once did the fan go above the 60% mark even though it was kept under load for an hour.

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. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


The power consumption numbers we saw were quite interesting even with the Super Overclocked card running at its predetermined clock speeds. I personally thought that a card which such high clocks would consume a lot more power than the reference-clocked version. Even though the results were surprising, they are still extremely good.