GeForce GTX 295 review - BFG

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Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels

Setting up the PC

Installing the card into your system will be a fairly easy job. Just slide the card into a free PCIe slot, connect the DVI cable to one of the DVI connectors, connect both the 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors to the card.

Especially with a high-end card like this... I do recommend you to buy a decent PSU with some reserves, always. The PSU is an extremely important component in your PC. We'll get into that in a minute though.
Once the card is installed we startup Windows. We install our driver, reboot and you should be good to go. The card will work straight out of the box, there's no need to enable SLI or anything as the Multi-GPU feature will be detected and enabled by default.

BFG GeForce GTX 295 review
The 6 and 8-pin power connectors. The tiny connector is the S/PDIF lead.

Power Consumption

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is not as bad as I expected it to be. Again, the card according to NVIDIA has a TDP of roughly 289 Watts.

The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. After we have run all our tests and benchmarks we look at the recorded maximum peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC.

From a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is pretty good with the new 55nm products.

Sidenote: however, we recently upgraded our test-platform, which by itself utilizes a lot of energy.

It's Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.7 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

The ASUS motherboard also allows adding power phases for stability, which we enabled as well. I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to these settings and then add the CPU overclock. Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is much higher than your average system.

  • System in IDLE = 226 Watt
  • System with GPU in FULL Stress = 416 Watt

The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly 420 Watts, and for a PC with this high-end card, this is excessive but remains within acceptable levels. You'll pay roughly 40 cents (EUR) for each two hours you will play games if the GPUs where constantly maxed out.

The IDLE Wattage is really good though, the card is clocking down massively, giving really good power consumption. We'll show you that in a graph in a minute.

So here's my power supply recommendation:

GeForce GTX 295

  • A GeForce GTX 295 requires you to have a 700 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 50 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.

GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI

  • A second GeForce GTX 295 requires you to add another 300 Watts. You need a 1000 Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 70 Amps available on the 12 volts rails. 

Also with Quad SLI bear in mind you'll need two 6-pin AND two 8-pin power connectors.

There are many good PSU's out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

  • bad 3D performance
  • crashing games
  • spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the  PC
  • freezing during gameplay
  • PSU overload can cause it to break down

Noise Levels coming from the graphics card

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 bought 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. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS
Jet takeoff (200 feet) 120 dBA  
Construction Site 110 dBA  Intolerable
Shout (5 feet) 100 dBA  
Heavy truck (50 feet)  90 dBA  Very noisy
Urban street  80 dBA  
Automobile interior  70 dBA  Noisy
Normal conversation (3 feet)  60 dBA  
Office, classroom  50 dBA  Moderate
Living room  40 dBA  
Bedroom at night  30 dBA  Quiet
Broadcast studio  20 dBA  
Rustling leaves  10 dBA  Barely audible

We test all cards on dBA levels. Obviously the reference coolers all perform roughly the same. The customized coolers are either louder or softer depending on what they try to achieve.

  • So in IDLE mode, you will not hear the card. We measure 43-44 dBA coming from the PC.
  • Gaming with an average title not stressing the GPU too much we can hear the fan a little, we measure roughly 44 dBA.
  • When we loop 3DMark Vantage for a while the GPU really heats up, as a side-effect the fan RPM will go up even higher, the noise-levels are now 45-46 dBA which definitely can be heard, overall these results are a tad noisy.

The core temperature

Let's have a look at the temperatures this huge cooler offers.

BFG GeForce GTX 295 review

So pretty much we fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be mid-gaming, we literally stress the GPU 100% here. We measured at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius.

Now a couple of things are interesting here. First off you should see the P-states we discussed earlier, normally these will save you energy. In 2D mode the GPU tries to save power by lowering clocks & voltages, therefore running at a much lower core frequency.

At idle you can expect a temperature of ~50 degrees C. Pretty normal. Yet once we push the GPU to 100%, the temperatures take a pretty hefty toll and settle at 75 Degrees C. But also remains fine within designed operational specifications.

Though air will be exhausted outside the PC, always make sure you PC chassis is well ventilated.

Last thing I wanted to show you, look at the beginning of the chart and see how well the GTX is clocking down to preserve energy. Clocked down that's 300 MHz on the core, 600 MHz on the shader domain and the memory hogs back to 100 MHz (x2).

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