Legit Video Card Reviews
EVGA GTX 400 Series High-Flow Exhaust Bracket Review
| Manufacturer: | eVGA |
| Product: | High-Flow Exhaust Bracket (M020-00-000171) |
| Date: | Thu, Jul 01, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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EVGA GTX 400 Series Video Card Exhaust Bracket
EVGA recently announced that they have begun to sell their NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series High-Flow Video Card Exhaust Bracket
that is said to lower GPU temperatures by up to 5C. The bracket is compatible with GeForce GTX 480, 470, & 465 video cards and is available for $9.99 shipped. If you own a registered EVGA GeForce GTX 400 series video card then you can get the bracket for $4.99 as they give it to you for just the cost of shipping and handling. Our frequent
readers will remember that we showed you this bracket at Computex 2010, so EVGA has gotten this to market very quickly.
Lowering your video card temperatures by up to 5C for under $10 doesn't sound like a bad idea. All you need to do is remove a few screws and four stand offs on the DVI adapters and the bracket can be switched out in just a few minutes without having to worry about voiding the warranty. The question that we have to figure out is if the NVIDIA reference design exhaust bracket really that restrictive?
The NVIDIA reference design is the exhaust plate on the top and the new more free flowing EVGA plate is the one pictured on the bottom. You can see that EVGA has added some slots along the DVI and mini-HDMI ports and decreased the number of 'bars' in the reference design vent area. Will just stamping out the plate with some larger slots and some new holes really make that big of a temperature difference? We are about to find out!
For this test we will be running an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 reference card inside our office PC to give you real world performance numbers inside a case with the door on it. We'll be using the Corsair Obsidian 800D enthusiast case and will be running the latest drivers, which are Forceware 258.69 beta.
We will also be bolting up the reference card to the EVGA high-flow exhaust bracket to see how it performs as that is of course the entire point of this article!
In order to go the extra mile for our readers we will also be testing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 without any exhaust bracket on it at all to see how it performs. If the exhaust bracket is really that restrictive removing it should improve cooling performance even more right? Sounds great in theory, but the one downside to removing the PCI slot bracket is that you lose the support for the video card. The last thing you want is a $400 video card hanging down unsupported looking like it is going to snap off. The video card also no longer lined up perfectly with the slots on the back of the case, which hindered airflow.
In order to solve this we turned to our video card 'jack' that was given to us by PowerColor at Computex 2010. This little stand is fully adjustable and we were able to set it to support the weight of the video card and to properly lineup the exhaust ports with the PCI slots in the back of the Corsair Obsidian 800D. For a simple test like this you'd be surprised what you have to do in order to get proper and fair numbers.
Next Page - The GF100 Exhaust Bracket Test Results
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