Thermal Performance

We've changed our thermal testing procedures to one that we feel more accurately represents real world gaming. When your in a gaming session there are peaks and troughs in demands that are put on your GPU. These can be in the form of dying and getting a loading screen, messing around in the menu system or simply travelling around part of a map where there aren't any explosions of other pwnage to render. During these stages, your graphics card cooler will dissipate any excessive heat that was built up during more graphically periods of game play.

Synthetic benchmarks such as FurMark thrash the GPU constantly. Not only is this not reflective of how a GPU will be getting abused in gaming, it's such a hardcore test that any GPU under test is guaranteed to hit the 90°C mark at which point the firmware will kick in the fan to keep the GPU within the safety limits of 90°C or under. For this reason, we were getting results that were more dictated by the cards' firmware than the cooler, as no matter how good the cooler was, FurMark was going to keep pushing until the GPU was hotter than freshly toasted PopTarts.

Instead, we now load up a level of Crysis in DirectX10 mode at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA and leave it as it stands, resisting the urge to jump on and start playing. Every time the character is killed, the game loads again automatically from the last save point and the cycle is started. This process replicates the peaks and troughs of a gaming session. We leave it for an hour till the temperature has stabilised and then compare the delta Ts.



This was probably the most disappointing result of all of the tests we ran on the Lightning. With its custom cooler, we where expecting to see a considerable different in the delta Ts of the Lightning and the Stock GTX 260. When you weigh into the equation that the stock card will spit the air directly out the back of your case and the Lightning won't, you'd be as well to just use a stock cooler.