NVIDIA GTX 275 Review

ccokeman - April 2, 2009
» Discuss this article (22)

Testing:

To test out this latest video card from nVidia, I will run it through a series of game tests and synthetic benchmarks to see just how the performance compares to that delivered by similar video cards, as well as its direct competition from the red camp. The OverclockersClub test system will be run as listed with the processor at 3.0GHz. The respective video card settings that will be used are the driver defaults with settings made in game as noted to provide as few variables as possible.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): nVidia GTX 275
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64-bit

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

nVidia GTX 275 729/1217/1586

When it came time to overclock the GTX 275, I used RIvaTuner 2.24 as my tool of choice to increase the fan speed and clock speeds on the GTX 275. I started out with what I thought was a pretty aggressive jump in clock speeds to 700MHz on the core and 1200MHz on the memory and the GTX 275 did not flich and passed through several stress tests, including Furmark and looping 3DMark06. After this point I went a little conservative and went up in 10MHz increments on the GPU core until it failed stability testing at 740MHz. I dropped the core speed down 5MHz at a time to find out the point I was stable at and finished up at 729MHz. I used the same method increase for the memory but was not able to get much more than the 1217MHz I finally called it stable at. During the overclocking phase I kept the fan speed at 100% to keep the card as cool as possible with the increase in clock speeds. The final core clock speed of 729MHz is a 96MHz overclock with the memory increase at 83MHz over stock. Not monster increases, but good enough to offer increases in the frames per second delivered in each game tested.