Power Consumption

We'd normally graph the results from our Watt's up Pro to directly compare any card on test with others. However, this is unfar in this case, as the power draw of the BFG GTX 285 H20 system will be massively skewed by the Laing D5 pump we've used in the liquid cooling loop. We feel that including the power draw of the pump when measuring the power draw of the card would have been unfair to BFG, and the results aren't that meaningful to anyone who hasn't got a Laing D5 anyway.

We could have powered this pump from another PSU, but then we'd be too kind to BFG - you need a pump of some kind to force the liquid through the waterblock after all, and this should be accounted for in some way in our testing and analysis.

In the end, we've decided to quote the peak and idle power draw of the system without graphing that data with the power draw of other graphics cards. So, the BFG and Laing D5 combination caused our system to draw between 217W and 402W from the wall.

Thermal Performance

To thermally test the cards we recorded GPU temperature using RivaTuner. Idle readings were taken at the desktop in Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium with Windows Aero enabled, while the load reading taken while the GPU configuration was running our Crysis benchmark in DX10 mode with High settings at 1,920 x 1,200 with 0xAA.

This is one of the most demanding tests in our benchmarking suite, and is sure to get GPUs sweating. We don't push the settings higher because if we increased the workload too much, some of the slower cards won't deliver realistic numbers as they're unable to do all the work being asked of them.

All temperatures were taken with the cards cooled using only their standard stock coolers and running on our open air test benches, which have no additional airflow other than that present in the room.



The idle temperature of a stock-speed GeForce GTX 285 GPU is surprisingly low at 39°C, and we were surprised to see the Danger Den waterblock only improve on this by a meagre 3°C.

This surprise was mainly because we performed the performance and load temperature testing first, and found the Danger Den block to be amazingly efficient. After hours of running all our benchmarks and game tests, the waterblock was hardly warm – even the areas over the memory were tepid to the touch. This is in stark contrast to the reference cooler for Nvida’s GT200 cards which can get so hot it’s painful to touch.

Our (frankly weird) touchy-feely session with the waterblock (four grown man taking it in turns to stroke a lump of copper can’t be normal) made us confident that the 39°C peak temperature of the GPU when under load is accurate. The Danger Den DD-GTX285 is clearly incredibly good at cooling (although bear in mind that, in our test system, the GTX 285 GPU was the only component being cooled by the loop). With our promise to include two reviews for the price of one, we set about overclocking the BFG with a certain degree of apprehension – such an awesome cooler was going to make finding maximum stable frequencies an awfully long job.