Shootouts

The Zenith of 3D Gaming - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 Roundup

By Kenny Yeo & Vincent Chang - 23 Dec 2009

Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking

Temperature

With most of the cards here sporting custom cooling solutions, save for the Zotac GeForce GTX 285 AMP! Edition, we were interested to find out which was most effective. Unsurprisingly, it was the Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition that came out tops, recording a chilly 57 degrees Celsius at load thanks to its massive triple-fan cooler from Arctic Cooling.

The ASUS, MSI and Zotac cards all performed somewhat reasonably, but it was the Palit GeForce GTX 285 that was most disappointing. Despite its dual-fan cooler and reference clock speeds, the Palit card recorded 78 degrees Celsius at load, which was not far off from the Zotac's 81 degrees Celsius, and to think the Zotac was the most heavily overclocked of the lot!

 

Power Consumption

Our pack of cards performed quite homogeneously on our power consumption tests, with all of them managing around the same power draw at load and idle. If we were to nitpick, Palit once again disappointed us somewhat with its idle power draw.


Overclocking

Since these cards are aimed at gamers and enthusiasts, we were interested to see just how much overclocking overhead these cards had. The Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition came out tops here, managing a stunning overclock of 770MHz at the core and 2740MHz DDR at the memory, giving it a 10% bump in 3DMark results.

Give or take some, the rest of the cards topped out at roughly 730MHz and 2600MHz DDR respectively for the core and memory.

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