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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The GF100 Exhaust Bracket Test Results
We used a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 video card with Forceware 258.69 drivers to test out the new high-flow exhaust bracket.
To get the idle temperatures we used GPU-Z 0.4.4 and let the system idle for 30 minutes and wrote down the idle temperatures recorded by the graphics driver. We did not use the ADT7473 sensor readings, just to be crystal clear.
In order to get the load numbers we ran Furmark v1.8.2 at a resolution of 1280x1024 for 10 minutes and took GPU-Z temperature readings for the GPU and PCB. We then repeated this test three times over a period of two days to cancel out slight variations in room temperature due to the time of day and temperature rises from testing.
Much to our shock using the EVGA high-flow exhaust bracket did lower the load temperature just slightly. In a room with the temperature at 76F we noticed just a one degree difference. We repeated our test three times over three days and on one day when it was extremely warm we noticed a 4C difference, but the room wasn't properly climate controlled. For the test results above we had to bring in a window air conditioner, and two fans in to circulate air to keep the room a constant 76F. When running the GeForce GTX 480 at full load for 10 minutes and then doing it multiple times in a row the room temperature would quickly spike up more than the central air could handle. The biggest shock of the test group was just removing the exhaust bracket all together as the idle and load temp dropped up to 4C by just removing the bracket and holding the card up with the PowerColor GPU support stand!
We also recorded the PCB temperatures and showed that at load the EVGA bracket did help by 1C in the climate controlled room. With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 video card exhaust bracket removed we once again noticed a rather significant drop, which makes us think that the simple metal plate on the back of your video card really does impact airflow by a measurable amount. This is an idea that we would have laughed at last week, but our thoughts have changed on that!
Final Thoughts and Conclusions:
The EVGA bracket might have been a joke to some people, but in all honesty it does appear to work ever so slightly. We had high hopes that we would see a 5C drop, but for our specific test system we only noticed a 1C drop at full load on average. This could be due to the fact that the Corsair Obsidian 800D had great airflow to begin with or a number of other variations like room temperature or the application used to get the max temperature. Maybe we should have waited longer than 10 minutes to get the full load temps, but in all honesty we didn't want to cook the video card at 102C for hours and hours on end as even though NVIDIA says the card is built for high temperatures. Is the bracket worth buying? From our testing it shows a 1C drop and if that is worth $5-10 to you then go for it. If you want to see a bigger temperature drop then you should save up for an aftermarket cooler or go liquid cooled.
EVGA has told us that all their NVIDIA GF100 video cards are now shipping with this bracket. It might be a minor temperature drop, but it is still a drop regardless. We can only hope that more companies will try new tricks like this out and kudos to EVGA for leading the way on bringing better features to the market for enthusiasts. Without EVGA releasing a plate like this we never would have benchmarked temperatures of a video card with changes to the exhaust plate!
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