Temperatures & overclocking
Temperature musings
We perform our testing on an open test bed with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.
| Graphics cards | BFG GTX 280 OCX 1GB |
BFG GTX 280 1GB |
EVGA GTX 260 FTW 896MB | EVGA GTX 260 896MB | Sapphire HD 4870 X2 2GB |
Force3D HD 4870 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ambient temperature | 22°C | 21.5°C | 23°C | N/A | 24°C | 23.5°C |
| Idle temperature | 54°C | 47°C | 53°C | N/A | 73°C | 78°C |
| Load temperature | 74°C | 74°C | 71°C | N/A | 95°C | 90°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 52°C | 52.5°C | 48°C | N/A | 71°C | 67°C |
The BFG GTX 280 OCX maintains reasonable temperatures throughout testing, barely any warmer than the EVGA GTX 260 FTW that uses a very similar cooler
The AMD offerings, by contrast, are positively hot, with idle temperatures the same as load temps on NVIDIA cards. What's more, their fans are louder, too.
Overclocking
We managed to raise the OCX's frequencies to a maximum stable overclock of 665MHz core, 1,480MHz shader and 2,680MHz memory.
The core, as you may have noticed, wouldn't overclock at all - even a 5MHz bump would result in graphical corruption. Clearly BFG bin the OCX model right on the edge of the GTX 280's potential. Despite this we were able to increase clockspeeds an additional 1.5 percent on the shaders and 11.67 percent on the memory, over the already heavily pre-overclocked figures of 1,458MHz shader and 2,400MHz memory.
Looking back at the ET:QW test at 1,920x1,200 we see that the OCX card at its shipping clocks scored an average 95.20fps. When overclocked this rose to 98.13 fps: a 3 percent increase, but still slower than you-know-what.
