Over the past 30 years the average high temperature in southeastern Virginia for the month of April is 66° Fahrenheit / 18° Celsius. I waited until April 15th to conduct GPU temperature tests when the outdoor temperature was around 75° Fahrenheit / 23° Celsius and the humidity level was high. My computer is located in the smallest room on the second floor and is quite warm during the summer months even with the central air conditioner running. Additional cooling is being provided by a 5000 BTU window-unit air conditioner that I purchased a few years ago.
The Computer Room
The additional cooling gives me the capability to control the room temperature, which I try to keep around 75° Fahrenheit / 23° Celsius. However, on this particular day the room temperature reached a high of 83° Fahrenheit / 28° Celsius when the air conditioning was turned off and the window and door to the room were closed.
The temperature test consisted of running a demo from Enemy Territory in a continuous loop at full speed in a 1024x768 window for approximately five minutes. While the demo was being played back, I observed the temperature readout in the Temperature Settings applet in the driver control panel. The results from three different room temperatures are shown in the following table. The computer case was closed while testing.
GPU Temperature Test Results
Even at the highest room temperature the test completed without incident. The results indicate that the cooling system on the reference board is effective at keeping the GPU temperature under control. The following screenshots show the highest GPU temperature recorded during each of the three tests.
Room temperature at 72° F / 22° C.
Room Temp at 22° C - GPU Temp at 57° C
Room temperature at 76° F / 24° C.
Room Temp at 24° C - GPU Temp at 63° C
Room temperature at 83° F / 28° C.
Room Temp at 28° C - GPU Temp at 71° C
CHANGE LOG
This following is a list of changes that have been made to this preview since it was originally published:
April 16, 2004 - Page 1: Added information about the features of the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Added a picture of the GeForce 6800 Ultra seated in the AGP slot.
April 17, 2004 - Page 2: Added 4X antialiasing image quality comparisons with the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and Radeon 9800 Pro from 3DMark03's Wings of Fury. Added comments in regards to "texture crawling" while observing the Wings of Fury benchmark being run on the GeForce 6800 Ultra and Radeon 9800 Pro.
April 18, 2004 - Page 1: Included a labeled image of power supply leads. Estimated wattage used by test system components based on the Power Supply Wattage Calculator.
April 18, 2004 - Page 2: Included a screenshot from the antialiasing settings in the driver control panel.
April 24, 2004 - Page 2: Added a page that covers CineFX 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0.
May 1, 2004 - Page 5: Corrected Call of Duty 4X AA and 8X AF benchmark results. The 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 results were transposed.
May 8, 2004 - Page 1: Split page 1 into two pages. Added availability and price information for the GeForce 6 product line.
May 8, 2004 - Page 4: Added no antialiasing and 4X antialiasing comparative screenshots from Dungeon Siege.
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