NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 – fast and hot
By: Anton Rachko, Vladimir Romanchenko
Cooling system efficiency; power-saving system
Riva Tuner 2.09 already supports the new GT200 chip.
So we had no issues with measuring the temperature of the video card. As before, we'll be verifying the efficiency of the cooling system using the Firefly Forest test from the 3DMark 06 suite. The test conditions are: the resolution 1600x1200, 4-X FSAA, and 16-X AF. After nine runs of the test we produced the following results:
The graphic chip heated up to 85 C, the rotational speed of the cooler went up from 500 RPM to 1100 RPM. Note that despite the substantial rise in the fan's rotational speed, the cooling system of the video card has remained really quiet.
Video cards of the GTX200 series can boast an effective power-saving system which allows providing below 70W power supply in the idle state, or in the 2D mode. That has been attained to the substantial reduction in clock speeds of the video card in 2D mode to 300/100 MHz for the graphic processor and to 200 "true" MHz for the video memory. In the 3D mode, the frequencies of the video card rise up to 601/1296 MHz for the GPU and 2214 'true' MHz for the video memory.
A bit earlier, we mentioned possible issues with the power supply which we came across in the power supply unit. On launching 3D applications, our video card turned off, with its indicator changing the color from green to red. As it turned out, it was the PSU Hiper 880 W to blame for. The issue was solved through replacement of the PSU with Thermaltake Toughpower 750 W.
Benchmarking and conclusions
We'll be testing Leadtek GTX280 on a test bench of the following configuration:
| Test configuration |
| CPU |
Intel Core 2 Quad X6850 3.0 GHz |
| Motherboard |
ASUS P5E3 (Intel X38) |
| RAM |
Corsair Dominator DDR3 2 x 2 GB 1333 MHz 6-6-6-18 1T |
| Operating system |
Windows XP+SP2+DirectX 9.0c / Windows Vista for DX10 tests |
| Power supply unit |
Thermaltake Toughpower 750 W |
For Leadtek 280GTX, we used drivers of version 177.34. We start examining the test results with 3DMark test suites.
In 3DMark tests, the new product has not demonstrated its speed capabilities to the full, thus yielding to GeForce 9800GX2. However, the dots on i's may be put with gaming tests in which we were running with 4x FSAA and 16x AF enabled.
At Call of Duty 4, Leadtek 280GTX demonstrated a bit better results than GeForce 9800GX2. The results for other video cards turned out to be lower, but frankly no so considerably.
On the other hand, at Crysis the Leadtek GTX280 showed all its worth to the other participants of the tests. GeForce 8800 Ultra was left well behind, let alone the GeForce 8800 GTS 512. The only real rival for GeForce 280GTX became GeForce 9800GX2, but we should not forget that the latter is some sort of a combination of two G92 chips, that is, in fact it is two video cards "all in one".
Finally, we can experience the comfortable values in all the three resolutions at Crysis powered by Windows Vista. GeForce 9800GX2 was unable to compete against the new product, which the SLI was to blame for. Alas, but in the new operating system this mode has not been brought to perfection.
At Need for Speed Pro Street Racing, GeForce 9800GX2 took the first place. That's it - sometimes even "top-ends" yield to their predecessors.
At Call of Juarez, the good luck again abandoned the new product, and the victory was behind GeForce 9800GX2. However, as we stated earlier, the latter uses the SLI mode, which imposes some restrictions on it. These are not only the issues of compatibility to some games, which is nowadays a rare thing, but also an issue with image output to no more than a single monitor.
On switching to Windows Vista, the alignment of forces in Call of Juarez almost has not changed, and the first place was preserved by GeForce 9800GX2.
At Need for Speed Carbon, Leadtek 280GTX won back the crown of leadership. GeForce 9800GX2 has not lagged behind much, but anyway the GT200 chip proved stronger than two G92 chips in the SLI mode.
At Prey, Leadtek 280GTX has not lost its leadership, however we expected somehow better results from it. This game is sensitive to the video memory bandwidth which should grow up in the new product due to expanding the memory bus to 512 bit.
Final Words
As we can see, no revolution has happened: the new GPU GT200 and the GeForce 280GTX tested today is a further progress NVIDIA's unified shader architecture. The new GPU offers more functional blocks than its predecessors do, which gives it the right to be referred as the most powerful GPU to date. It should be noted that apart from high performance in 3D applications, the new chip claims for the first place at distributed computations, and currently this is the project Folding@Home. Nor we should forget about the technology for computations with NVIDIA Cuda graphic processors, as well as acceleration of "physics" in games. The latter will be fully compatible to the AgeiA PhysX engine, and only a special driver will be needed, whose time of release is already at hand. However, it is still unclear how popular the new chip GT200 will be in non-graphics applications, but that aspect will be clarified in our forthcoming reviews once we've got all the required drivers and utilities on hand.
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