Overclocking

We were hugely impressed with the GTX 275’s overclocking abilities when we looked at our stock review sample back in April, with the stock cooled card happy to overclock by huge margins. Sadly though this awesome overclocking didn’t make it into Palit’s revised GTX 275 design, so we were hopeful that the iChill’s stock PCB and hugely improved cooling would unlock even more overclocking headroom for the GTX 275.

However, our experienced was somewhat mixed even despite the huge cooling improvement offered by the mountain of copper and aluminium mounted to the iChill GTX 275. After a few hours of gradual overclocking and patient stress testing, we settled on an overclock of 755MHz core (up from 670MHz) 1665MHz shader (up from 1474MHz) and a memory clock of 1245MHz (2490MHz effective), up from 1175MHz (2350MHz effective).

While these are undoubtedly some serious overclocks, representing improvements over a stock clocked GTX 275 of nineteen, eighteen and ten percent respectively. As expected - because the card is the same as the reference design, they’re actually surprisingly similar to those overclocks of our reference GTX 275, and actually because the iChill lacks memory cooling, the stock card can achieve an extra margin of 50MHz (100MHz effective) of the GDDR3.



It seems that it’s not the GTX 275’s cooling that was holding it back when it comes to overclocking but more the lack of voltage running through the core that would be required to reach even higher clock speeds. As such, all that extra cooling laid on by the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme seems wasted, with the iChill only offering small overclocking improvements over a stock card, and in the case of memory, actually offering less overclocking headroom.

Final Thoughts

While the overclocking performance might be solid then, it’s hardly different to what’s possible with a stock GTX 275. The same can be said for the iChill’s performance throughout our benchmark suite, with the iChill's out of the box performance only marginally superior to that of a stock GTX 275. While this still means that it’s a ferociously fast card, able to trouble a GTX 285 and even a heavily overclocked HD 4890 on numerous occasions, we’re uncertain of the cost/benefit being offered by the iChill here.

At a few pence shy of £210, the iChill GTX 275 is comfortably one of the most expensive 896MB GTX 275s out there, priced almost £60 above stock clocked models. That’s a huge forty percent price premium for what equates to less than a ten percent real world performance boost out of the box. The pricing problem seems to be caused by the choice to include the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme cooler, a piece of kit that sells on its own for upwards of £45. With so much copper and aluminium strapped to the card, the price has suffered as a result, and the only real advantage is significantly reduced operating temperatures, although these sadly seem to have little to no effect on the card’s overclocking headroom, and without the same acute fan control the stock GTX 275 has it has a uniform noise level while loaded or otherwise.

It’s a case of the an unnecessary tool for the job. The stock GTX 275 cooler was already perfectly capable at keeping the card stable even when heavily overclocked, as well as being whisper quiet at idle and reasonably subdued at load into the bargain. While the iChill’s huge cooler is marginally quieter under load (but only load) and chops off 30°C off those loaded temperatures, it brings with it few real world benefits, at the cost of a hefty price premium. In fact, because of its triple slot and super long size, you're more likely to have trouble finding cases and motherboards to support it.

With that in mind, it’s tough to recommend you really bother with the Inno3D iChill GTX 275. The huge price premium struggles to make sense unless you’re obsessed with keeping GPU temperatures down and the out of the box performance boost is minor and easily surpassed with a stock GTX 275. Any easy to use overclocking tool like EVGA’s Precision will do that in a cinch. While the GTX 275 remains an incredibly capable card, at an increasingly aggressive price, this probably isn’t the one to get.

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Score Guide