Temperatures & overclocking
Temperature musings
We perform our testing on an open test bed with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.
| Graphics cards | XFX 9600 GSO XXX 384MB | Sapphire HD 4670 512MB | Sapphire HD 3850 256MB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambient temperature | 23°C | 19°C | 18°C |
| Idle temperature | 56°C | 44.5°C | 45°C |
| Load temperature | 79°C | 81°C | 73°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 56°C | 62°C | 55°C |
All three cards, above, feature single-slot coolers yet manage to maintain reasonable temperatures. Of course, the small, fast spinning-fans that keep these cool are not particuarly quiet, so if noise levels are a big concern you may be well-served looking towards uprated or aftermarket heatsinks.
Overclocking
We managed to raise the XFX 9600 GSO XXX 384MB's frequencies to a maximum stable overclock of 725MHz core, 1,782MHz shader and 2,052MHz memory.
These represent overclocks of 6.6 percent on the core, 4.8 per cent on the shaders and 8 percent on the memory.
These overclocks were able to increase frame rates in the ET:QW test at 1,680x1,050 from between 38.3 and 50.5fps, to between 39.8 and 57.3fps - yet due to the huge variances the card experiences between runs of this benchmark, it's hard to generalise the performance increase the overclock would afford across most games.
