Wait, we’re going backwards?
There's a market out there in the world of computing for almost any product, especially within the graphics card arena. Ultra-budget cards are great for basic office or HTPC duties, mid-range reference cards hit a sweetspot between value and performance for those on a limited budget, and those crazier cards like the 5970 in this issue are out there to provide pretty frames faster than an obsessive caffeine enthusiast in a photo lab. However, this card doesn't really fit into any of those categories; it's in a category all of its own.
The G92b core at 55nm is the incredibly ancient (by industry standards) core running at the heart of the Eco, whose reference clockspeeds are usually 738MHz for a GTS250 - but here they're moved [i]backwards[/i], downclocking the core to 675MHz. There's a nice 1GB of GDDR3 memory included on an average 256-bit memory bus, but it's also been underclocked to 1000MHz, 100MHz lower than reference speeds. The reasoning behind this speed drop is to save power, of which Zotac reckon they save up to 40 per cent compared to reference cards, but it does come at a noticeable cost.
Performance in 3DMark06 is the most telling performance drop, losing almost a thousand points compared to a reference card. Vantage drops by almost six hundred, though both Crysis and GRID remain almost playable. If you notice anything strange about the performance - it's because it's almost there. 'But wait!', you say, "surely there are some temperature improvements for all this underclocking and whatnot?!". Well yes, but it's not breathtaking.
The card idled at 49 degrees with a noise generated of 51.9dBA, and increased by sixteen degrees to a maximum of 65 at 61.6dBA. This is a pretty slim increase (especially compared to the reference design's 28 degree increase), but it's much noisier. Exactly why it's noisier seems unclear, as the large-diameter fan should be able to turn slower to move more air. The culprit is probably the heatsink, a simple aluminium block with extruded fins that isn't amazing at removing heat quickly, causing the fan to react to the higher temperatures by spinning faster.
What is nice about the card, apart from the not-amazing heatsink, is the smoked plastic shroud that the fan is mounted to. It guides airflow out the expansion bracket's vents, as well as over the PWM at the end of the card, and keeps the memory chips cool at the same time. The PCB that everything is plugged into is coated in a very nice black colour, and it looks pretty slick. Even though it's a supposedly low-power-consumption model the Eco demands the use of an 8-pin PCIe power connector, though thankfully there's a dual 6-pin to single 8-pin connector thrown in for those with older power supplies. Plenty of memory onboard allows games with large textures, but gaming at high resolutions with plenty of antialiasing might cause slowdowns due to limited transfer speeds.
Even though this card has been factory underclocked (a concept that we're still struggling with), re-overclocking it was a pretty disappointing experience. The core behaved itself until it reached seventeen per cent higher (788MHz), barely over the reference speeds of the G92b core. Memory speeds also didn't increase much, in this case only hitting five per cent higher (1054MHz) than factory speeds.
There's not much to sweeten the deal here either, with a disc full of CUDA demos thrown in without any full versions or games, and performance that just isn't there. If you need lower-powered graphics performance that is still better than ultra-budget cards, it's a decent choice, but for everyone else it's something to be avoided.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012