Q1 2004 Vendor Graphics Card Roundup

Core Temperatures

With the new CATALYST 4.1 drivers from ATI, we are able to monitor GPU temperature via the driver, similar to the system NVIDIA already had in place. Unfortunately, until we write an application to monitor GPU temperatures on both ATI and NVIDIA cards, we will have to rely on the reading of the temperature from the driver window as soon as a game exits. Of course, this system is not ideal as it can't take time averages or find peak temps during game play.

The procedure that we used was very repeatable, and does a good job of getting enough data to compare our cards to each other. We opened the driver temperature display and ran the Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark with AA and AF enabled and recorded the temperature that we saw immediately after the third benchmark ran. This particular game exits quickly from the benchmark, so the temperature of the card doesn't have very much time to drop. And the GPU doesn't need much time to cool. I've noted chips cooling 20 degrees Celsius about 2 seconds after a game exited. Without further ado, here are the idle and low temperatures that we achieved for all the cards that would give us a reading.

Everything looks as it should: the highest end cards are the hottest (with a notable exception in the Sapphire Radeon 9800XT Ultimate Edition, which was pretty cool and fast as well). We also must consider that NVIDIA GPUs are underclocked when running at 2D speeds so their idle temperatures should be lower on average than ATI GPUs.