Temperatures & overclocking
Temperature musings
We perform our testing on an open test bed with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.
| Graphics cards | NVIDIA GTX 280 1GB | EVGA GTX 260 FTW 896 MB | NVIDIA GTX 260 896 MB | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB | Force3D Radeon HD 4870 512MB | PowerColor HD Radeon 4850 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ambient temperature | 21.5°C | 23°C | N/A | 23.5°C | 23.5°C | 25°C |
| Idle temperature | 47°C | 53°C | N/A | 53°C | 78°C | 77°C |
| Load temperature | 74°C | 71°C | N/A | 67°C | 90°C | 82°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 52.5°C | 48°C | N/A | 44°C | 67°C | 57°C |
The EVGA GTX 260 FTW remains at reasonable temperatures throughout testing - especially when you compare to the toasty ATI cards - and the cooler remains quiet even under load conditions: quality engineering.
Overclocking
We managed to raise the FTW's frequencies to a maximum stable overclock of 700MHz core, 1,425MHz shader and 2,550MHz memory.
These represent overclocks of 5.1 percent on the core, 1.5 percent on the shaders and 15.1 percent on the memory over the already heavily pre-overclocked figures of 666MHz core, 1,404MHz shader and 2,214MHz memory.
Looking back at the ET:QW test at 1,920x1,200 we see that the FTW card at its shipping clocks scored an average 81.37fps. When overclocked this rose to 85.13 fps, a 4.6 percent increase, but not quite enough to match a GeForce GTX 280.
