The Striker - NVIDIA's New GeForce GTX 275
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Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
We know from past experiences that the reference cooler that NVIDIA provides for its GTX-200 series cards is inadequate, and the GTX 275 certainly showed the cooler's shortcomings. Recording a peak operating temperature of a whopping 89 degrees Celsius, the GTX 275 could serve as a heat source for cold winter days should one be lucky, or unlucky, enough to experience the four seasons.
However, the cooler is no different from the rest in the series and there shouldn't be a reason for this radical temperature reading. We believe it has something to do with poor power optimization which we noted in the next segment below.
Power Consumption
The GTX 275 fared poorly here too as we noted its peak power consumption figures to be higher than the competition and even the GTX 285. This, however, could most be due to the drivers we received from NVIDIA, which are still in beta phase and might have poor power optimization. This issue is quite likely linked with the higher temperatures we noted above. Hopefully, this issue would be ironed out once the new drivers go live. Hence take these readings here with a pinch of salt.
Overclocking
Unlike the Radeon HD 4890 we've seen earlier, the GeForce GTX 275 is a reluctant overclocker. We only managed to increase the core clock speeds by a meager 37MHz and memory clock speeds by a more respectable 132MHz DDR. This gave us an additional 294 3DMarks or a 5% increase on 3DMark Vantage, putting it nearly on par with the GTX 285.
