NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Versus ATI Radeon HD 4890

Temperature Testing

Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC Idle Temperature:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Idle Temperature:

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how these cards generate heat under load. In order to get proper temperature readings of both the ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards I used GPU-Z to monitor and log the GPU temperature. As you can see from the screen shot above, the idle state of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OC drops the GPU frequency down to 240MHz to help conserve power and lower temperatures. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 drops down to 300MHz on the core and 1100MHz on the memory. Let’s compare that to some other cards while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky in order to get the highest load temperature while playing at 1280×1024 with all the settings on high.

Thermal Testing

Power Consumption Results: The extra heat-pipe in the ATI Radeon HD 4890 really helps cooling performance over the two heat-pipe design found on the Radeon HD 4870 512MB and 1GB cards. The GeForce GTX 275 also does very well at idle, but under full load it gets much hotter than the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216.