Palit GeForce GTX 275

Value and Final Thoughts

After the disappointment of Palit’s Revolution 700 4870 X2, which sported a similar cooler and redesigned PCB, we were a little apprehensive coming into this review. That's especially true when you consider that the Palit GeForce GTX 275 is currently the cheapest GTX 275 on the market by a fair margin.

However, we’ve been pleasantly surprised throughout, with the Palit GTX 275 delivering perfect stock card performance throughout our test suite alongside an extremely quiet operation thanks to the dual fan custom cooler and notably superior power efficiency in comparison to a stock GTX 275. We’ve seen this before with Palit cards and for those thinking about folding performance in particular it’ll be a big bonus - just as long as it's kept cool.

We do have a few reservations about the custom cooler though, brought about following our overclocking experiences with the card, of which were very disappointing. While perfectly capable at the card’s stock speed, the use of a thin aluminium plate to cool the memory rather than incorporating it into the central heatsink has meant that any attempt to overclock the card’s memory immediately leads to instabilities, with the memory only being cooled by second hand hot air from the GPU, unlike on the stock card where the memory, GPU and PWM cooling is amalgamated together.


We also noticed that, during our overclocking, the card would start throwing driver errors when the GPU temperature reached 90°C following increases in the core and shader clocks, with the cooling fans never spinning up above 30 percent speed. It’s obvious that Palit has used the standard firmware from a stock GTX 275, which only spins the cooling fan up when the GPU temperature reaches 90°C, but by using a completely different cooler, with very different thermal properties, it’s generated some potential stability problems - especially when overclocking.

However, while our overclocking experiences were disappointing, at stock speeds this card has excelled in a way we really weren’t expecting. Cooler, quieter and, amazingly, more power efficient than a stock GTX 275 while delivering identical performance: there’s a great deal with which to recommend this card. What’s more, it’s available for just £200 at a number of e-tailers (from launch we might add), undercutting standard stock GTX 275’s by a significant margin of £30 and coming in at just £10 more than the very cheapest Radeon HD 4890s.

Considering the Palit GeForce GTX 275 performs identically to the Nvidia stock models available from other board partners, and still holds an overall performance advantage over the Radeon, this makes it absolutely fantastic value. If you’re thinking of picking up GeForce GTX 275 and don't care to faff about with overclocking then the Palit GeForce GTX 275 is the one to get.

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• 8/10

• Features
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• 9/10

• Value
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• 9/10

• Overall
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• 9/10

Score Guide