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Is it Hot out there ?
Temperature wise the cooling design works but dang it is getting hot though. At idle, normal operation expect ~42 Degrees C. At 100% VPU utilization we measured a 70 Degrees C temperature easily. The product can take it but that heat is dumped into your PC case and this will heat up other components. You need good ventilation for sure. Look at the bright side, you'll save money for heating your room in that cold winter. Speaking of ventilation, the cooling fan at 100% utilization does not make a lot of noise, which is a huge plus.

Idle Graphics core temperature monitoring in Degrees C ~ 42

100% Stressed Graphics core temperature monitoring in 70+ Degrees C

Excuse me, Watt ?
New in our reviews will be the results in Wattage. We see an increasing trend in power consumption. With the upcoming reviews we'll show you the difference. We simply look at the peak performance during a 3DMark05 session. Follow me:

At idle the PC consumes 124 Watts, when we take SiSoft Sandra and utilize 100% CPU (no 3D graphics) then the PC will consume 210 Watts. We know that the PC consumes a lot as it's a Pentium 4 Prescott based 3.6 GHz CPU. In 3Dmark the PC peaked from a steady average 252 Watts to a peak of 261 Watt. Now you know why 300 Watt Power Supplies are not sufficient anymore these days.

So I think it's safe to say the graphics card consumes 50 to 60 Watts during 3D gaming. Considering that the PCI Express bus can feed 75 that's quite safe and also the reason you did not see an external power supply connected to this graphics card.

In the future we'll compare the wattage on a chart with other graphics' cards.

To your left the PC in idle, to your right 3DMark05 is running and power usage is slowly building up.