Thermal Performance

Even a game as demanding as Crysis will have peaks and troughs in terms of GPU load, whereas some GPU utilities, such as Nvidia's Badaboom media encoder or certain Folding@home work units will now place your graphics card under extreme load for extended periods of time.

With that in mind, we've selected FurMark 1.6.0 to stress graphics cards to their absolute thermal maximum. We've used the benchmark's Xtreme burning stability mode, running at 1,280 x 1,024 with 0xAA, 16xAF and waited for five minutes for the GPU to reach its absolute maximum temperature.

While this is an extreme GPU test, pushing cooling solutions to the limit, do remember our test rigs are all housed inside Antec 1200s, with all fans set to full speed to ensure our benchmarks run reliably. In less well ventilated cases, these cards will likely run a few degrees hotter, or will spin up their coolers to higher RPMs to maintain GPU temperature.



There's only one way to describe the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB's cooler - awesome. While idle temperatures drop by a full 13°C, it's the performance in the Xtreme burning mode in Furmark that really surprised us, with with Gigabyte coming in a full 38°C below the Nvidia designed reference cooler. As Furmark is an extreme example of GPU load which doesn't allow a cooler a lull time to disperse heat away this result is incredibly impressive and demonstrates that Zalman's VF1050 is clearly a very capable bit of cooling kit.

Sadly things aren't so good on the noise front and the Zalman cooler is much louder than the stock GTS 250 cooler when idle thanks to the 70mm cooling fan only being connected by a two pin power cable rather than the standard 4-pin PWM. This means the fan spins at a constant speed regardless of load and while the Gigabyte is quieter under heavy load, at idle it's much, much noisier. As much as love gaming, realistically you'll spend more of your PC time idle at desktop than fragging n00bs, and it's here that the Zalman cooler is unfortunately let down.