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EVGA GTX 400 Series High-Flow Exhaust Bracket Review - EVGA GTX 400 Series Video Card Exhaust Bracket - Legit Reviews
"EVGA GTX 400 Series Video Card Exhaust Bracket
EVGA recently announced that they have begun to sell their NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series High-Flow Video Card Exhaust Bracket that is said to lower GPU temperatures by up to 5C. The bracket is compatible with GeForce GTX 480, 470, & 465 video cards and is available for $9.99 shipped. If you own a registered EVGA GeForce GTX 400 series video card then you can get the bracket for $4.99 as they give it to you for just the cost of shipping and handling. Our frequent readers will remember that we showed you this bracket at Computex 2010, so EVGA has gotten this to market very quickly.
Lowering your video card temperatures by up to 5C for under $10 doesn't sound like a bad idea. All you need to do is remove a few screws and four stand offs on the DVI adapters and the bracket can be switched out in just a few minutes without having to worry about voiding the warranty. The question that we have to figure out is if the NVIDIA reference design exhaust bracket really that restrictive?
The NVIDIA reference design is the exhaust plate on the top and the new more free flowing EVGA plate is the one pictured on the bottom. You can see that EVGA has added some slots along the DVI and mini-HDMI ports and decreased the number of 'bars' in the reference design vent area. Will just stamping out the plate with some larger slots and some new holes really make that big of a temperature difference? We are about to find out!
In order to go the extra mile for our readers we will also be testing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 without any exhaust bracket on it at all to see how it performs. If the exhaust bracket is really that restrictive removing it should improve cooling performance even more right? Sounds great in theory, but the one downside to removing the PCI slot bracket is that you lose the support for the video card. The last thing you want is a $400 video card hanging down unsupported looking like it is going to snap off. The video card also no longer lined up perfectly with the slots on the back of the case, which hindered airflow.
In order to solve this we turned to our video card 'jack' that was given to us by PowerColor at Computex 2010. This little stand is fully adjustable and we were able to set it to support the weight of the video card and to properly lineup the exhaust ports with the PCI slots in the back of the Corsair Obsidian 800D. For a simple test like this you'd be surprised what you have to do in order to get proper and fair numbers.
In order to get the load numbers we ran Furmark v1.8.2 at a resolution of 1280x1024 for 10 minutes and took GPU-Z temperature readings for the GPU and PCB. We then repeated this test three times over a period of two days to cancel out slight variations in room temperature due to the time of day and temperature rises from testing.
Much to our shock using the EVGA high-flow exhaust bracket did lower the load temperature just slightly. In a room with the temperature at 76F we noticed just a one degree difference. We repeated our test three times over three days and on one day when it was extremely warm we noticed a 4C difference, but the room wasn't properly climate controlled. For the test results above we had to bring in a window air conditioner, and two fans in to circulate air to keep the room a constant 76F. When running the GeForce GTX 480 at full load for 10 minutes and then doing it multiple times in a row the room temperature would quickly spike up more than the central air could handle. The biggest shock of the test group was just removing the exhaust bracket all together as the idle and load temp dropped up to 4C by just removing the bracket and holding the card up with the PowerColor GPU support stand!
We also recorded the PCB temperatures and showed that at load the EVGA bracket did help by 1C in the climate controlled room. With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 video card exhaust bracket removed we once again noticed a rather significant drop, which makes us think that the simple metal plate on the back of your video card really does impact airflow by a measurable amount. This is an idea that we would have laughed at last week, but our thoughts have changed on that!"
"EVGA GTX 400 Series Video Card Exhaust Bracket
EVGA recently announced that they have begun to sell their NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series High-Flow Video Card Exhaust Bracket that is said to lower GPU temperatures by up to 5C. The bracket is compatible with GeForce GTX 480, 470, & 465 video cards and is available for $9.99 shipped. If you own a registered EVGA GeForce GTX 400 series video card then you can get the bracket for $4.99 as they give it to you for just the cost of shipping and handling. Our frequent readers will remember that we showed you this bracket at Computex 2010, so EVGA has gotten this to market very quickly.
Lowering your video card temperatures by up to 5C for under $10 doesn't sound like a bad idea. All you need to do is remove a few screws and four stand offs on the DVI adapters and the bracket can be switched out in just a few minutes without having to worry about voiding the warranty. The question that we have to figure out is if the NVIDIA reference design exhaust bracket really that restrictive?
The NVIDIA reference design is the exhaust plate on the top and the new more free flowing EVGA plate is the one pictured on the bottom. You can see that EVGA has added some slots along the DVI and mini-HDMI ports and decreased the number of 'bars' in the reference design vent area. Will just stamping out the plate with some larger slots and some new holes really make that big of a temperature difference? We are about to find out!
In order to go the extra mile for our readers we will also be testing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 without any exhaust bracket on it at all to see how it performs. If the exhaust bracket is really that restrictive removing it should improve cooling performance even more right? Sounds great in theory, but the one downside to removing the PCI slot bracket is that you lose the support for the video card. The last thing you want is a $400 video card hanging down unsupported looking like it is going to snap off. The video card also no longer lined up perfectly with the slots on the back of the case, which hindered airflow.
In order to solve this we turned to our video card 'jack' that was given to us by PowerColor at Computex 2010. This little stand is fully adjustable and we were able to set it to support the weight of the video card and to properly lineup the exhaust ports with the PCI slots in the back of the Corsair Obsidian 800D. For a simple test like this you'd be surprised what you have to do in order to get proper and fair numbers.
In order to get the load numbers we ran Furmark v1.8.2 at a resolution of 1280x1024 for 10 minutes and took GPU-Z temperature readings for the GPU and PCB. We then repeated this test three times over a period of two days to cancel out slight variations in room temperature due to the time of day and temperature rises from testing.
Much to our shock using the EVGA high-flow exhaust bracket did lower the load temperature just slightly. In a room with the temperature at 76F we noticed just a one degree difference. We repeated our test three times over three days and on one day when it was extremely warm we noticed a 4C difference, but the room wasn't properly climate controlled. For the test results above we had to bring in a window air conditioner, and two fans in to circulate air to keep the room a constant 76F. When running the GeForce GTX 480 at full load for 10 minutes and then doing it multiple times in a row the room temperature would quickly spike up more than the central air could handle. The biggest shock of the test group was just removing the exhaust bracket all together as the idle and load temp dropped up to 4C by just removing the bracket and holding the card up with the PowerColor GPU support stand!
We also recorded the PCB temperatures and showed that at load the EVGA bracket did help by 1C in the climate controlled room. With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 video card exhaust bracket removed we once again noticed a rather significant drop, which makes us think that the simple metal plate on the back of your video card really does impact airflow by a measurable amount. This is an idea that we would have laughed at last week, but our thoughts have changed on that!"
