ASUS ENGTS450 TOP Temperatures

Benchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you're an overclocker, gamer, or merely a PC hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there's no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking Video Cards, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a graphics cards for better performance. Of course, not every video card has overclocking head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin testing, we use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next we use FurMark's "Torture Test" to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained at a stable 23°C throughout testing.

FurMark does two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than applications of video games realistically could, and it does so with consistency every time. Furmark works great for testing the stability of a GPU as the temperature rises to the highest possible output. The temperatures discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world performance.

The two GTS 450 cards are fairly matched at idle, with the HD5770 coming in slightly warmer, and the HD4870 running considerably hotter. Once a load is applied, though, the heatsink and fan unit on the HD4870 show its strength. Of course, it was the loudest of the three as well. The HD5770 clearly runs the hottest, followed by the EVGA GTS450 FTW. Thanks to the DirectCU cooler we looked at earlier, though, the ASUS ENGTS450 TOP manages to keep itself a bit cooler. It's not quite the 20% ASUS claimed, but it's still decent and didn't result in any noticeable increase in noise over the EGVGA.

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