Temperatures and overclocking
Temperature musings
We perform our testing on an open test bed with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.
| Graphics cards | BFG GTX 260 OCX 896MB |
Leadtek GTX 280 1GB |
EVGA GTX 260 FTW 896MB | Leadtek 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 | 52°C | 47°C | 53°C | N/A | 73°C | 78°C |
| Load temperature | 70°C | 74°C | 71°C | N/A | 95°C | 90°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 48°C | 52.5°C | 48°C | N/A | 71°C | 67°C |
It's no secret that NVIDIA cards are cooler-running than their AMD counterparts - a fact borne out by the relatively modest load temperature of the BFG card.
We much prefer NVIDIA's overall cooler implementation, too, as the fan doesn't nearly spin-up as loudly as AMD Radeon HD 4800-series'.
Bonus marks to BFG and NVIDIA here.
Overclocking
We managed to raise the OCX's frequencies to maximum stable speeds of 710MHz core, 1,420MHz shader and 2,560MHz memory - a decent increase over the stock 665MHz/1,404MHz/2,250MHz frequencies.
Looking back at the ET:QW test at 1,920x1,200 we see that the OCX GTX 260 card scored an average 81.33fps at its shipping clocks. When overclocked this rose to 85.43fps: not quite fast enough to beat out a stock-clocked GTX 280.
