Cooling

The cooling system on the Zotac card (of the reference design) does not differ principally from what we saw in GeForce 8800 GTS 512. It's actually the same. It's a turbine-like cooler that drives the air through the heatsink inside a long plastic housing. The hot air is ejected out of PC enclosure, so the card with this cooling system takes up two slots.

And the Palit card is equipped with a cardinally different cooling system. Engineers from this company always make graphics cards of unique design with unique coolers.

For one, memory chips on the back side of the PCB are cooled with a large heatsink, while memory chips on the front side have only a small plate ventilated by the CPU fan.

And the core is topped with a small but efficient heatsink with a copper base and heat pipes. This assembly is covered with plastic housing with a large fan in the center, slow and quiet.

We monitored temperatures using RivaTuner (written by A.Nikolaychuk AKA Unwinder). Here are the results:

Zotac GeForce GTS 250 AMP! Edition 1024MB

Palit GeForce GTS 250 Sonic 2048MB

Owing to the thinner process technology used in the core, operating temperatures of both cards are within the norm, they are actually not very high for a modern graphics card.