LOSTCIRCUITS

In terms of cooling, Gainward relies on a standard solution to provide efficient cooling of the card's front, the air leaving the GPU cooler also cools the RAM-sinks. On the card's back, things don't look that rosy, the RAM sinks are smaller and in addition there is no active ventilation. In theory, this might contribute to a limitation in overclocking, however, one needs to keep in mind that the graphics RAM usually does not run hiot enough to really require active cooling, rather, the function of RAM-sinks can be considered to buffer local hotspots on the chips and, thus, smaller cooling units are probably adequate for standard operating conditions. Also keep in mind that most systems enjoy air-cooling of the CPU which, by itself causes air circulation at the back of the card. Our test system is watercooled and, therefore, this additional source for air movement was missing.

The highest frequencies at which the card was actually running stable were 320 MHz (core) and 738 MHz (memory). Using the expert tool, it seems that the granularity of the frequency is limited to 5 MHz steps. With a different BIOS, it might be possible to enable 1 MHz steps to push to the absolute max, however, a bit of forced margin provides more stability, otherwise factors like weather and temperatures could influence the stability of the system.

Additional cooling was achieved through the 120 mm fan leaned against the card to compensate for the disadvantage of the smaller ramsinks

  

Close-Up of the cooler: The GPU-cooler also blows over the RAM sinks. On the right, the top of the cooler was removed to show the curved fins

The "Enhanced Mode Settings" automatically clocks the card to 310 / 680 MHz (core / memory) Gainward guarantees the functionality of the card at those frequencies, however, this warranty is reserved for the "Golden Samples"

The most important panel within the Expert Tool is the frequency adjustment

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