21st Century Fox(conn) proudly presents.
From the first moment that we withdrew this long, hard, black, phallic object from the colourful packaging, we knew we were in for a very fun time. Inserting it into our test rig gently (and reseating it a few times to show we cared), we got down to stimulating the card to make it heat up.
Ok, we'll stop with the suggestiveness, but this is still a rather impressive card for what it is. The g94 core inside it has 64 stream processors running at a very nice speed (a slight bump over stock clocks) and plenty of GDDR3 memory to fit in all those game mods that we love so much (sure a 200MB atomic-green sky texture might seem excessive, but it's totally worth it). Manufactured on a 65nm process, this is a very capable card, with two DVI ports and a SLI tab giving potential future upgrade paths with dual monitors and cards respectively.
Described earlier is the sleek black stock cooler, taking up a single slot with a large fan, many aluminium fins and a few copper heatpipes to move the heat around effectively. The drawback of this style of heatsink is that the heat is dumped into the case, but an upside is that it leaves plenty of room for other expansion cards, even when running two of them.
Temperatures are managed pretty well too, idling at 48 degrees and hitting 61 at load, with 49.5dBA and 51.1dBA respectively - this was pretty quiet, and definitely ignorable once in a case. Gaming performance was quite nice, and benchmark scores reflected this theme similarly. Keep in mind that since temps are quite low, you'll be able to overclock this card and squeeze more out of it, something that is easily done and very worthwhile for serious gamers.
Issue: 106 | November, 2009