There's nothing much to be said here other then it's a very complete bundle and has two very nice games included. The card itself seems to be 100% NVIDIA reference based but we'll show you that and even more in our photo-shoot.

Power Supply Requirements

So NVIDIA is recommending nothing too dramatic in terms of a power supply unit. Let's test that...

Excuse Me Sir, but Watt Did You Say?


With the ongoing trend in an increased power consumption we will check the statement that NVIDIA made about power consumption in. We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify those claims. The graphics card consumes roughly 75 Watts at peak during 3D gaming, this is also the reason why we see a 6-pin power connector on the card. Your PCI-Express 16x bus can deliver only 75 Watts to a graphics card. I never understood power requirement decision making as half a year after its release PCI-Express graphics cards were already consuming more power than the slot could provide.

Of course we do what we always do with new graphics' cards, we monitored the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU.

In 3DMark the PC shows a maximum peak use of 240-250 Watt. Now you know why 300 Watt Power Supplies are not sufficient anymore these days, you need 350 at the least. We have confirmed NVIDIA's statement.

Well it's hot in a sexy way, but the temperature remains well within the safety margins.

The bigger two slot exhaust coolers we see on a lot of cards these days actually do have my preference as single slot coolers tend to dump that heat inside your PC, where as the dual slot coolers are designed to dump that heat outside the PC. As always, make sure your PC is well ventilated.

Irritating. Yes I'm talking about the noise that PC's these days produce. The only way that will change that is if we all will pay attention to it.

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bough a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask ? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.

We startup a benchmark, we take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card. We measure roughly 50 dBa which is to be considered a moderate noise level coming from the PC. Again, this is a very subjective test.