NVIDIA TNT2 Roundup (July 99)

The temperature of the cards was taken during a 30 minute run of looped Quake 2 demos at 1024 x 768. The temperature was monitored using a thermistor on an ABIT BE6 using the Winbond 83783S hardware monitoring chip. Motherboard Monitor 4.08 was used to record the temperatures and the highest consistent values were used. Unfortunately the Gigabyte GA-660 could not be added to the heat comparison as there was no way to attach a thermal probe to the card courtesy of the heatsink glued to the back of the card. At the time of testing, the ASUS V3800 cards were not available in AnandTech's lab however their results will be added as soon as possible.

At the default clock speed, the two big name retail boards, the Creative and Diamond TNT2 Ultra solutions, take the lead followed by the Hercules TNT2 Ultra that is clocked 25MHz higher than its hotter Diamond/Creative counterparts. The Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32, clocked at the same core as the Hercules ran 2 degrees cooler, possibly due to yield differences in the two chips. The most interesting of the bunch is the Hercules Dynamite TNT2 (non-Ultra) whose 145MHz core clock kept it at a temperature even lower than the 125MHz clock of the Leadtek card. The yield on AnandTech's sample Dynamite TNT2 was unusually high (it overclocked perfectly fine to 190/190), possibly resulting in a cooler temperature at the default clock speed.

The Diamond and Creative cards are obviously not the best in terms of cooling, as the regular Dynamite TNT2 had no problem beating the two retail kings by a good 9 degrees at 170MHz.

Yield differences in the two Hercules chips kept the Ultra 2 degrees warmer than the regular TNT2 at the 175MHz core frequency, yet all three of the cards that remained in the 130's kept noticeably cooler than the Creative Labs and Diamond cards that seemed to hover around the 140 degree mark. While your out of box experience may vary in terms of temperature as well, it's obvious that Diamond and Creative don't have the best cooling solutions for their products.