At a room temperature of 72.1° F / 22.3° C and humidity level of 43%, the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked reached a peak temperature of 74° C while running the Real-Time High Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting demo running in a 640x480 window. It took approximately six minutes to reach the peak temperature.
In a follow-up test, the FurMark utility placed a greater amount of stress on the GPU as the peak temperature reached 84° C. Both tests were run with the side of the case open as shown in the photograph on page 3.
OVERCLOCKING
The find optimal speed tests using the referece driver generated slighty aggressive clock speeds with a recommendation of the following increases:
Core: from 628MHz to 711MHz - 13%
Memory: from 1053MHz to 1218MHz - 16%
Shader: from 1350MHz to 1514MHz - 12%
The Crysis benchmark failed to run at the recommended setting and following a series of tests, a successful run was completed using the following clock speeds:
Core: 700MHz - 11%
Memory: 1125MHz - 7%
Shader: 1425MHz - 6%
Gains from an already overclocked model are always appreciated, but in reality overclocking a graphics card can yield a mixed-bag of results. In Crysis for example, performance was a few percent higher, although the minimum frame rate increased from 24fps to 29fps at the resolution of 1920x1200. The respresented a healthy 21% increase in performance. This test was repeated a second time with the same results occurring.
CONCLUSION
The EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked ran flawlessly during the six weeks that I used it in my system. The GPU runs cool and fan noise can be varied as necessary. With EVGA's strong support features, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked is highly recommended by nV News.
I planned to test the performance of the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked againt one of my all-time favorite graphics cards - EVGA's GeForce 8800 GTX ACS3 Edition, which debuted in November of 2006. However, for those of you still holding on to the GeForce 8800 GTX, the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked makes for a compelling upgrade.
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