Temperatures & overclocking
Temperature musings
We perform our testing on an open test bed with a 120mm fan simulating case airflow.
| Graphics cards | ZOTAC 9800 GTX+ AMP! 512MB | Leadtek 9800 GTX+ 512MB | Gainward GTX 260 896MB | Sapphire HD 4870 512MB | PowerColor HD 4850 512MB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ambient temperature | 21°C | 23.5°C | 22.5°C | 23.5°C | 25°C |
| Idle temperature | 44°C | 53°C | 52°C | 78°C | 77°C |
| Load temperature | 64°C | 67°C | 70°C | 90°C | 82°C |
| Ambient-to-load delta | 43°C | 44°C | 48°C | 67°C | 57°C |
The ZOTAC 9800 GTX+ AMP! remained
cool and quiet throughout testing,
especially when compared to the toast HD 4800 series.
Overclocking
We managed to raise the AMP!'s frequencies to a maximum stable
overclock of
810MHz core, 2025MHz shader and 2600MHz memory.
These represent overclocks of 7.14 percent on the core and
shaders and 13.04
percent on the memory over the already pre-overclocked speeds.
Looking back at the ET:QW test at 1,920x1,200 we see that the
AMP! card at its
shipping clocks scored an average 57.17fps. When overclocked this rose
to 62.97
fps, a 10.14 percent increase. With this additional headroom, it seems
all the
more odd that ZOTAC didn't increase the clocks further for its AMP!
edition,
which may have made the additional cost over a reference design more
palatable.