Gigabyte GTX 275 1792MB 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.


The temperatures this card pumped out came as a bit of a surprise considering the speeds it runs at. However, the reason for this decrease over the reference card is a slight increase for the fan speed of the GTX 275 Super Overclock. This doesn’t make it loud per se but we have to remember that the fan on a standard GTX 275 is dead quiet. One way or another, Gigabyte card is still quiet but not silent.

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.


Considering the performance the Super Overclocked showed throughout the tests, it was pleasant to see it consuming less power than a GTX 285. However, when it comes to performance per watt there is no way it can beat the current crop of ATI’s DX11 cards.