Palit uses a dual-fan cooling setup instead of the single fan on the NVIDIA heatsink. Another change is the voltage regulation circuitry which has been designed with cost in mind.

Conclusion:

This video card is cheaper than reference design cards and has a great overclocking potential. Only two outputs can be active at the same time and next to that it's noisy under load and has a higher power consumption than the reference card. During gaming there is an increase in power draw of app. 20 Watts. A higher power consumption means more heat which needs to be handled by the heatsink, the Palit card is running a few degrees Celsius cooler the the reference model. The dual fan design has about the same noise as the reference cooler in both idle and load.

Overclocking:

The GPU core was OCed @740 MHz (22% increase) and the GDR5 RAM @925 MHz (11% increase).

Benchmarks:

BattleForge, Call of Duty 4, Call of Juarez 2, Company Of Heroes, Crysis, DiRT 2, Far Cry, Far Cry 2, Prey, Quake 4, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky, 3D Mark 2003, 3D Mark 2005, 3DMark06, Dawn of War 2, HAWX, Metro 2033, Riddick: Dark Athena, Unigine Heaven 2.0, Unreal Tournament 3, World In Conflict, Power consumption, Performance per watt/dollar, Temperatures.

Test Setup:

• CPU: Core i7 920
• Mainboard: Gigabyte X58 Extreme
• RAM: 6B Mushkin Redline 1600MHz XP3-12800 DDR3
• HDD: Western Digital Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
• PSU: BFG ES-800 800W
• OS: Windows 7 x64
• Monitor: LG Flatron W3000H 30 inch 2560x1600