Cooling System

The new GeForce GTX 295 is also different from the old one when it comes to the cooling system. The latter had a sophisticated cooler that looked like an aluminum sandwich, but the new card’s cooler is very elementary.

This cooling system consists of two heatsinks made from thin aluminum plates and connected to the copper bases with a couple of heat pipes. These heatsinks are responsible for cooling the hottest parts of the GeForce GTX 295, namely its GPUs. Considering the reasonable thermal and electrical parameters of the 55nm version of the G200 chip, the design and size of these heatsinks is quite acceptable. They should do their job well enough. Each heatsink is fastened to the cooler’s base with four spring-loaded screws. There is a layer of dark-gray thermal grease between the cooler’s copper sole and the GPU cap.

The other components that require cooling, such as memory chips, voltage regulators, nForce 200 and NVIO2, touch the aluminum frame the fan is installed on. Fiber pads soaked in white thermal grease are used as a thermal interface for the memory chips and power circuit elements whereas the open-die chips contact with the cooler’s base via gray elastic thermal pads. The memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB are cooled with two metallic plates and have the above-mentioned pads with thermal grease. The plates are fastened through the PCB to the cooler’s base.

The cooling system uses an ordinary 4.8W 80x20mm axial fan from Forceon (DFB802012M00T). We could not find its specs but the letters DFB in the marking may mean Dynamic Fluid Bearing, which is supposed to ensure a longer service life and a lower noise level. We don’t know the bearing type for sure, but we will measure the card’s noise shortly. The fan’s airflow goes to both heatsinks but, like with the GeForce 7900 GTX, only the left airflow leaves the system case through the slits in the card’s mounting bracket. The right airflow goes in the opposite direction, i.e. into the system case, which is not good since even one G200b chip produces over 100W of heat despite the 55nm tech process. Anyway, this cooler should be quieter than the composite “sandwich” installed on the old dual-PCB version of GeForce GTX 295. It may also prove to be more effective, but we will check this out shortly.

Summing it up, the cooler of the new GeForce GTX 295 follows the engineering principle of making things simpler whenever possible. We do not know the manufacturing cost of the new and old versions of GeForce GTX 295, but we are sure that the new version must be considerably cheaper just because it has one instead of two PCBs. Thus, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has got a dangerous rival in terms of both pricing and performance. Perhaps this will make AMD and partners hurry up with the launch of the faster Radeon HD 4890 X2.