GeForce GTX 275 Roundup (Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Sparkle, BFG)

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Left 4 Dead: Survival Pack

Left 4 Dead: Survival Pack

For benching Left 4 Dead, we used a pre-recorded timedemo taken on the No Mercy campaign during The Rooftop Finale mission. Framerates were captured with FRAPS.

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Tom Clancy’s Hawx (DX9)

Tom Clancy’s Hawx (DX9)

Even though HawX has a built-in benchmarking tool, we found that it did not provide accurate enough results needed to reflect what actual in-game performance would be. Thus, we played through the first 6 minutes of a mission and recorded the results with FRAPS.

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Tom Clancy’s Hawx (DX10 / 10.1)

Tom Clancy’s Hawx (DX10 / 10.1)

Even though HawX has a built-in benchmarking tool, we found that it did not provide accurate enough results needed to reflect what actual in-game performance would be. Thus, we played through the first 6 minutes of a mission and recorded the results with FRAPS. DX10.1 was enabled for ATI cards.

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Heat & Acoustics

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.

Considering nearly every card in this roundup has the same heatsink, we got exactly what we were expecting with the temperatures staying pretty much even. Out of the “stock” cards there was one standout: Gigabyte. They claimed that their Ultra Durable VGA technology would mean lower temperatures. Unfortunately, this wasn’t meant to be as the fan was set to start spinning up when the core hit 88*C which is exactly what all the other card were set at as well. One way or another, all of the card here were blissfully quiet.

MSI’s Twin Frozr proved to be a true wolf among the sheep. The temperatures it displayed were nothing short of incredible considering the heat generated by the core on the GTX 275. Add to that a near-silent running experience and we can say that MSI completely hit the nail on the head with their custom cooler.

 

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Power Consumption

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.

In the power consumption tests we see that the old adage that more speed means higher power consumption hold true for the majority of the cards. What was impressive was the fact that the EVGA FTW was able to compete with a GTX 285 and yet proved to be more efficient at load. As in the temperature testing, Gigabyte’s boast of their Ultra Durable design was put to the test and was left wanting. Granted, Gigabyte only mentioned that switching power loss would be improved and the overclocked memory may have worked against them but in the past the UD VGA cards did indeed have better overall efficiency. Not this time though.

MSI once again surprised us with the efficiency of their card. It is overclocked to one of the higher core speeds of in this roundup and yet it proves to be almost as efficient as the reference GTX 275.

 

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Overclocking Results

Overclocking Results

What do we consider a stable overclock? If the card can pass our test which involves a 20 minute loop of 3DMark06, 30 minutes of playing Far Cry 2 and an additional 30 minute gameplay sequence in Left 4 Dead, it is considered stable.

Since overclocking can vary from one card to the next within the same family of cards, you should be aware that these results will not be considered when voicing our final opinions about these four cards. As such, we will show you the final overclocking results but leave our opinions to ourselves and let you guys form your own conclusions.

BFG GTX 275 OC

Final Overclocks

Core: 681Mhz
Shader: 1513Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2560Mhz

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EVGA GTX 275 FTW

Final Overclocks

Core: 713Mhz (unable to attain stability past stock speeds)
Shader: 1512Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2636Mhz

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EVGA GTX 275 1792MB

Final Overclocks

Core: 692Mhz
Shader: 1535Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2392Mhz

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Gigabyte GTX 275

Final Overclocks

Core: 709Mhz
Shader: 1573Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2598Mhz

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MSI GTX 275 Twin Frozr OC

Final Overclocks

Core: 725Mhz
Shader: 1607Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2550Mhz

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Sparkle GTX 275 PLUS

Final Overclocks

Core: 711Mhz
Shader: 1580Mhz
Memory (DDR): 2602Mhz

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Conclusions (BFG OC & EVGA FTW)

Conclusions

Even though Nvidia’s GTX 275 hasn’t been on the market for all that long, it has already begun to find its niche in today’s highly competitive world. At first, things didn’t look too good for it considering its paper launch and subsequent unavailability at most retailers for weeks following the “official” availability date. Truth be told though, Nvidia played their hand perfectly as the announcement of the GTX 275 was timed perfectly to take the wind out of ATI’s sails on the HD 4890’s launch day. As such, quite a few people held off purchasing Team Red’s new wunderkind until they saw exactly where Nvidia’s card would end up price-wise.

In its stock form this card provides surprisingly good value when compared to Nvidia’s top of the line GTX 285 and proves itself to be a perfect alternative to its closest competition: ATI’s HD4890 1GB. Indeed, when you look at things from a pure price / performance standpoint, the GTX 275 is extremely hard to beat. As we mentioned in our original review: GTX 285 performance for a lot less money.

Unfortunately, the show and tell portion of this roundup was a bit dull due to the fact that when it comes to higher-end cards, most of Nvidia’s board partners just don’t have the luxury (or R&D money) to develop their own custom designs. The same goes for custom cooling solutions as well but at least these same manufacturers have been gung-ho to increase clock speeds to stratospheric levels.

Let’s get on to a few final words about each card, shall we?


BFG GTX 275 OC

BFG’s entry into this roundup proved itself to be perfectly placed to offer a bit of extra performance with it’s higher than stock clock speeds. However, those same clock speeds also prove to be this GTX 275’s greatest enemy as well since they are just not high enough to make a perceptible impact on gaming performance. The increases look good on paper but that’s about it.

Where BFG’s GTX 275 OC really comes into its own is in the value it offers for your hard earned dollars. At the time of writing, it was the least expensive of all the cards here while offering a lifetime warranty and the possibility of trading up to a better card once one becomes available. Granted, you don’t get a massive list of accessories or balls-to-the-wall clock speeds but not many people are looking for those types of extra (sometimes costly) items. In today’s economic climate, consumers are looking for less frills and more value. BFG’s GTX 275 OC offers just that and wins our Dam Good Value Award.

EVGA GTX 275 FTW

After talking to a number of manufacturers and even doing a few tests ourselves, it is pretty obvious that there is very little overclocking headroom in the GTX 275 cards. Certain board partners have struggled to release their high end products due to the simple fact that so few of these GPUs can run above 700Mhz. EVGA on the other hand has been successful in binning enough chips that their own FTW edition was released…and with a 713Mhz core speed to boot.

There are no two ways about it: this card is insanely fast. We have said time and again that with a certain amount of overclocking, the GTX 275 would easily surpass the GTX 285 in performance and the FTW does just that and then some. Granted, the 1GB of memory on the GTX 285 means that it wins in some cases where memory bandwidth means more than pure clock speeds but those instances are few and far between. In the battle between this GTX 275 and a stock GTX 285, EVGA’s overclocked card wins hands down.

With all this performance comes a hefty price premium over a run of the mill GTX 275 and from what we can tell, this card is one of the most expensive GTX 275s on the market. What stops us from counting this as a deal breaker is the fact that even at around $350CAD, it is still a good $50 - $75 less than a GTX 285. With the EVGA GTX 275 FTW widely available at retailers, it gets very hard to recommend even looking at a GTX 285 for most gamers. That’s why this card not only gets our Dam Good Award but also our Dam Good Value Award. Imagine, the most expensive card here getting an award for value….

 

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Conclusions (EVGA 1782MB & Gigabyte)

Conclusions

EVGA GTX 275 1792MB

If there is one type of card out there that always has us wondering about performance it is those which double or sometimes even triple the amount of memory seen on the reference card. Many times we have found the performance of these cards to be left wanting due to the fact that they usually use lower memory clock speeds. EVGA’s GTX 275 1792MB goes about things a bit differently since it doubles the memory of the stock card yet retains the same memory clock speeds.

All of the specifications looked like a surefire way to success but it was all for naught because those nasty ram latencies came back to bite the 1792MB card in its butt. Through nearly every single one of our tests this card performed comparably to and in some tests even offered less performance than the stock 896MB card. For a product that is priced within a few bucks of the godly FTW, this just isn’t acceptable.

It is unfortunate we weren’t able to show you that 1.7GB will lead to Grand Theft Auto IV’s idiotic Graphics menu unlocking higher detail settings and there may be some advantage in high resolution, high AA DX10 gaming. This is because the simple fact of the matter is that in some rare cases, close to 2GB of memory will benefit the end user. Like we said; for the time being these situations are few and far between and the premium price this card goes for will prove to be a waste for most end users.



Gigabyte GTX 275

If there was a card that had us hoping for something special, it was the GTX 275 from Gigabyte. Their box is basically used as a billboard for their Ultra Durable VGA movement (how many times have we said this now?) and we have had tons of success with these “UD” boards in the past. Indeed, the thought of a better overclocking, more efficient GTX 275 had us hoping that once again, against all odds Gigabyte would deliver on their marketing hype. They didn’t.

Honestly, a company can blow a summer’s worth of sunshine up the rear ends of its die-hard fans but the competition in the GPU market is fierce and if you can’t back up marketing with tangible results, you had best try again. From a consumer’s standpoint; overclocking was in line with other cards, heat production was identical to stock products and there wasn’t any savings on power consumption. There may be some fanciful song and dance going on behind the scenes we could see with a $4000 FLIR thermal imager but in our testing it seemed that the Gigabyte GTX 275 was a slightly modified reference card with some spiced up memory.

Speaking of memory, that is one thing about this card that came as a pleasant surprise for us. There is not one mention on the box or marketing materials that the supposedly “stock” Gigabyte GTX 275 sports overclocked memory. This allowed it to compete directly with both the Sparkle and BFG cards in terms of performance. With that kind of performance, a generous accessory package and widespread availability, our unassuming Gigabyte card could actually become a real threat if its price comes down. We just wish they would ditch the “Ultra Durable” marketing for this card.

 

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Conclusions (MSI & Sparkle)

Conclusions

MSI GTX 275 896MB Twin Frozr OC

The lone MSI card we received proved to be a breath of fresh air in a roundup cluttered with reference-based GTX 275 cards. Not only was the Twin Frozr OC the second highest clocked card of the bunch but it came with a custom designed heatsink which in itself made us stand up and take notice.

Let’s start with the heatsink first. Even though the 55nm core in the GTX 275 is supposed to produce less heat than the 65nm version in the GTX 260, properly cooling it off is a tall order as evidenced by the near lack of aftermarket air coolers for the current generation of higher-end Nvidia cards. Yet it seems that against all odds, MSI’s new heatsink worked like a charm and was able to keep core temperatures well below what we are used to seeing. It’s just a shame that all the hot air is dumped back directly into the case but let’s be honest: any enclosure with a half decent cooling setup will take care of that excess heat in no time.

Performance-wise, the Twin Frozr OC came pretty darn close to the GTX 285 but was never quite able to beat it in a straight fight. Couple that to a price that places it near may stock GTX 275 cards along with Canada-based RMA service and the recipe for success is definitely there. The only major issue we have with the MSI experience is the truly awful CoreCenter overclocking and monitoring software they advertise on their website.

Our hats really do have to come off to theose guys at MSI since they were not only able to deliver an overclocked card but also showed that it is possible to have an amazing, non-reference cooler without a huge increase in cost. Indeed, MSI’s Twin Frozr proved itself to be a glimmering beacon of change in an otherwise dull lineup of GTX 275 cards. It is different but in all the best ways possible and as such it wins our Dam Innovative Award.

Sparkle GTX 275 896MB PLUS

The last time we looked at a Sparkle card, their Calibre GTX 250 won our hearts and minds but their entry into the GTX 275 arena was somewhat dull by comparison. Maybe our expectations were too high because when push came to shove, the GTX 275 PLUS proved to be a great performer hamstrung with a slightly too high price and sparse availability. Its increased clock speeds do give it an advantage over the stock GTX 275 but we doubt any customer would really notice any difference in the games they play on a regular basis.

What we are used to seeing is very aggressive pricing from Sparkle but this time it just wasn’t meant to be. Part of this lies in the fact that Sparkle’s cards are quite hard to find in North America and as such, pricing is pretty much dictated by a few retailers.

In the grand scheme of things, Sparkle’s GTX 275 PLUS has the same clock speeds and performance as the BFG GTX 275 OC but it is also priced slightly higher and doesn’t come with as long of a warranty. We feel that with decreased pricing through expanded availability, Sparkle’s card could become a real competitor against the big guns.

Our thanks to all the manufacturers who participated in the roundup.

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