Trinity of Fans - Galaxy GeForce GTX 285 OC with AC Edition
Windows Vista Results - Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
This is the test that really matters most in the case of the Galaxy card. Does its huge Accelero Xtreme GTX 280 cooler actually make a difference? Well, we are happy to report that it does. Under heavy load, both the MSI and ASUS GeForce GTX 285 cards, which have reference coolers, recorded temperatures of about 80 degrees Celsius. On the other hand, the Galaxy GTX 285 AC only measured a 'chilly' 57 degrees Celsius. That's a massive 23 degrees Celsius difference, which is simply astonishing. With the card running so cool on its default clocks, we should be able to get some decent overclocking done later in our overclocking test.
Power Consumption
Considering the Galaxy GTX 285 AC's need for both a 8 and 6-pin power connector, we were expecting it to rake in some pretty big numbers here, but its maximum reading of 310W was the lowest of the our trio of GeForce GTX 285 cards. However, this might be due to improvements to power optimization in the new ForceWare 185.85 drivers than solely the card itslef. What's more glaring is its higher idle reading of 176W, which is due to the extra power all the fans are drawing.
Overclocking
With the card running so cool on its default factory clock speeds, we were confident that the Galaxy GTX 285 AC would be a competent overclocker. We were proved right when we managed to get a maximum overclock of 770MHz at the core and 2800MHz DDR at the memory. With these clock speeds, the Galaxy card was able to manage an impressive 6883 3DMarks on Vantage with Extreme settings. In fact, we think that if the XtremeTuner overclocking allowed us to tweak voltage settings, we would have got even higher clock speeds easily.