Cooling System

The new card’s cooling system has not changed much over the mentioned GeForce GTX 280.

It consists of an aluminum base with a copper core and six 6mm copper heat pipes.

A heatsink consisting of thin aluminum ribs is soldered to the base.

A small blower with automatic control is pumping air through those ribs, cooling the GPU as well as the PCB.

The efficiency of the graphics card’s cooler was evaluated in a small test. The card was installed into a closed system case and the room temperature was 24°C. The card’s frequencies and temperatures were monitored with RivaTuner 2.22 and 2.23. There were two test modes: 3DMark06’s Firefly Forest test running at 1920x1200 with 16x anisotropic filtering ten times (this is a typical load on the graphics card in 3D games) and FurMark 1.6.5 running in the stability check mode at 1280x960 (this is similar to Linpack but for graphics processors; the GPU is loaded very heavily here). Each test ran for 13-15 minutes until the GPU temperature stabilized at its maximum. Since I had dismantled the card before the tests, the default thermal interface of the GPU was replaced with Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease.

Let’s see what temperature the graphics card has when working at its default frequencies and with the automatic management of its blower.

As you can see, the GPU is never hotter than 85°C irrespective of the test mode. The only difference is that the card’s blower was working at a moderate 2200rpm in 3DMark06 and at a very loud 3250rpm in FurMark. The temperature of the PCB is 3°C lower in the latter case, though.

It is even more interesting at the maximum speed of the blower.

The higher speed of the cooler helps reduce the temperature greatly, by as many as 12°C, under typical 3D load (3DMark06). When running FurMark, the card has the same temperature as before, and there is no benefit from the higher speed (but this load is far different from real-life games).