Nvidia GeForce GTX 200: Cooling System

You may go farther and fare worse. Nvidia developer team that worked on the cooling system for the new graphics card family understands that well enough. In fact, Nvidia GeForce GTX 280/2600 cooler is yet another variation of ideas that have been first implemented in Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX cooling solution. It is one of the best reference systems combining excellent cooling efficiency with comfortable acoustics.

Of course, when they adapted the cooling system for the new graphics card family they took into account the peculiarities of the new graphics cards, such as high heat dissipation. As a result, the heatsink became much bigger and the metal external casing also became a part of the heat dissipating system, because as you may notice it warms up pretty significantly during work. Don’t try to grab Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 after it has been running under peak load for a while, because you will hardly enjoy the burning sensation in your fingers.

The top of the graphics processor contacts with a copper base connected with the heatsink via heatpipes. They use conventional thick gray thermal compound as thermal interface. The base has corresponding lugs where it contacts the memory chips, NVIO chip and voltage regulator components. These lugs are topped with fibrous pads soaked in white thermal compound – a traditional Nvidia solution. Since there are a few memory chips on the reverse side of the PCB, too, they also require cooling. The bottom part of the casing works as a cooler. If you have no experience with coolers like that, it is pretty hard to take the cooling system apart, as it is secured with 10 screws and a number of clips. In fact, Nvidia GeForce GTX 280/260 looks like a massive monolithic metal block with only a bracket and a PCI Express x16 slot connector on the outside. The developers scored big for the cooling system design: it is extremely reliable, protects the card against all sorts of physical damage, unless you apply special effort to breaking it, which we seriously doubt.

The system is equipped with a standard radial fan that we have already seen in previous Nvidia products. The airflow it creates cools down the heatsink and ousts warm air outside the system case through the slits in the bracket. The fan uses a four-pin power connector, like the fans of all other contemporary graphics cards. It features a rotation speed sensor and supports PWM control that ensures flexible adjustment of the fan rotation speed depending on the thermal conditions. The fan rotor bears an imprinted Nvidia logo, which may make life harder for the company’s partners who would usually put their own sticker there. In this case the sticker will not hold well and since the fan is rotating it will eventually come off and block the rotor. This may inevitably cause the card to overheat, exactly the same way it once happened to one of our Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 solutions, which lower fan failed for exactly the same reason.

Overall, the cooler design is very successful and we have no reason to believe that it may not cope with cooling the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 280, not to mention Nvidia GeForce GTX 260. However, G200 is expected to have extremely high heat dissipation, so before we make any conclusions we have to check out the real power consumption numbers.