We pull apart this complex GTX295 card to squeeze out better temperatures!
The GTX295 has been NVIDIA's latest card, taking the performance pole position and squashing ATI's offerings underneath its black shell. But how often have you wondered what exactly was inside one of these cards? Is it just a heatsink, or is there anything else in here working a little magic and if so - can we improve it?
While we're reasonably sure it's not going to be magic, we do know that there's going to be some cooling in here that can get tweaked, and that's where we step in. Pulling apart the 4870X2 was a relatively simple affair, something that most can manage without too much worry - this card is anything but.
This extra complexity comes from the GTX295's design, in that it's two separate PCB's sandwiched together, rather than two cores on the one. Both are oriented to face each other, and hence share the same heatsink, needing a very clever cooling solution and a lot of screws.
Knowing that most manufacturers will make their cards with an excessive amount of thermal paste, we narrowed our improvement choice down to just that - clean off the original goop, and replace it with some of our own. When we first had a look at the GTX295, we recorded an idle temp of 55 degrees and a load of 78, but will our improvements work? Keep reading to see what we do to the test subject GIGABYTE GTX295 pictured below.
Issue: 109 | February, 2010