Less doof-doof, more gaming, from EVGA.
Graphics cards don't usually contain fuel-injected engines within their sleek silicon bodies, so the picture on the front of this one is a little misleading. What it does tell (or at least hint at) is that this card has had a little tweaking under the hood, courtesy of the engineers at EVGA. Sadly a teensy overclock is the only thing different here, bumped up from a stock core clock of 738MHz to a gruntier 756MHz. Just like a hotrodder will tune their engine to show off to their peers, so have EVGA - the difference is that this isn't all that astounding.Built around the same G92 core that has been used in ten bajillion cards since its inception, this is essentially the equivalent of buying a V3 engine for your supercar shell - it just doesn't have enough cylinders to give a decent amount of power.
There are only 128 stream processors here compared to the GTX285's top-of-the-NVIDIA-pile 240 processors, which really hurts. A standard fuel tank with enough for 512MB of datafuel keeps the card running, connected with a 256-bit memory bus. DDR3 is naturally the order of the day, and has been used for quite some time in these kinds of cards.
754 million transistors burn through calculations inside the core, producing a sedate 37 degrees and 55.4dBA idle, but ramping up to 65 degrees and 58.3dBA with the pedal to the metal. This is pretty typical and shouldn't be too loud inside a case with other fans whirring away.
The cooler fitted to this card is your bog-standard reference design, with a squirrel-cage fan at one end sucking in cool air to pull through the rest of the card. There are a series of aluminium fins mounted to a solid aluminium block, which is extruded to run the length of the card and also cools the memory chips. All the solid capacitors and power regulation bits are hidden underneath the cooler's black plastic exoskeleton. A PCIe 2.0 slot is included as standard (with leather being an optional extra). Since this core doesn't need huge amounts of power to run only a 6-pin PCIe connector is needed, and EVGA include a molex adapter in the box just in case. Display options are pretty standard too at two DVI and a single analogue video out, with two SLI nipples at the top of the card and an SPDIF header to pipe digital audio through the DVI port, eventually hitting HDMI through an adapter straight into an amp or TV.
EVGA also threw in a copy of its Precision overclocking tool, which runs much like Rivatuner but works especially well with EVGA cards. Don't bother getting it from EVGA's site (you need to register), but there's plenty of other sites with it if you want to have a play around. We overclocked the card with our usual method; raising the core clock while tied to the shader clock, then the memory, and finally a run-through to make sure the settings are good. Our final speed was up 13 per cent to 855MHz on the core (+99MHz), seven per cent to 1180MHz on memory (+80MHz) and 2076MHz on the shader (+240MHz). This is an adequate result, but didn't offer huge amounts of performance.
The small stock overclock did give a noticeable change though, gaining a few hundred points extra in 3D06/Vantage. It went competently in Crysis, but as soon as it hit GRID's large resolution and settings it crapped out a bit, the 512MB memory filling up quickly and causing significant slowdown. This card is a decent value choice for budget gamers, but for those playing at high res or higher quality settings, look elsewhere.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009