this video is going to be a short casual test comparing the stock GeForce GTX 480
to the Zotac amp Edition GeForce gtx480
to a GeForce gtx480 with the GED icy
Vision so you can see these two coolers are quite similar both triple slot
coolers whereas the stock cooler is a dual slot cooler that blows the exhaust
out the back of the case both of these are going to exhaust air into the case
so while this isn't a perfect test because I am using an open test bench as
opposed to a closed case where these two would be at a disadvantage um it's still
going to give us a little bit of an idea so you can see I am running furmark in
extreme burn mode right now I am running
at uh 87° C so I've got MSI afterburner
running in the background there 87° C
fan speed is 79% so I'm going to let you listen to The Fan
it's quite loud a little bit on the obnoxious side my room temperature is 27
degrees celsus right now so at 8727
we're going to take that to be a 60°
Delta so Delta means the difference between the ambient temperature and the
uh temperature of the GPU and that's at 100% load at
79% fan speed so next we're going to run
the uh the Edition and then we're going
to run the IC vision and see how they compare in terms of noise and in terms
of the Delta oh I should probably mention the overclock I'm running at
right after burner I'm running at uh
1.07 volts and then I'm running at 850
and 2200 on the core and memory
respectively fan speed is set to Auto at all times well here's the Zotac amp
Edition I have to say right off the bat I'm very very impressed because we're
running at the same overclock here
okay so you can see here all of the settings are the same we're running the
same burn test and we are hitting a
maximum of 72° on the GPU but that's not
really the interesting part because that's not a whole lot lower our room
temperature right now is 26 so oh it's going to make me do math so
that's about
40 six I hope 26 72 whatever I'm going
to guess 46 and then I'll double check my math later so it's a 46°
Delta at here's the kicker
47% fan speed so
47% so let's say we go ahead and kick
the fan speed up I'm sure we can achieve
dramatically better temperatures like let's say let's put this fan up around
80% which is where the other one was and I bet even at 80% it won't be nearly as
loud oh actually hold on no no no wait ah we
got to go back to Auto we got to go back to Auto okay so we're back to 45% okay
so I'll let you listen to The
Fan basically you can't even hear it it's super quiet so if we go and ramp it
up to a fan speed that's more like what the other one was at which even at
80% is still not nearly as loud as the stock cooler at 80%
then I think we're going to see really really low GPU temperatures so I'll come
back once that stabilizes you can see my room's heating up a little bit now we're
at about 30° in the room but so even
more impressively than it would be if we were still at the same temperature we're
seeing 64° on the GPU that's very consistent so
that's at 80% fan speed we're not even going as uh as fast as we possibly could
so that's only a 34° Delta at 80% on the
Zotac amp Edition card so that's very
very impressive running at the same overclock setting so what that means is
you can either have more overclocking Headroom on on an amp Edition card so
you can turn your GPU voltages up higher or it means you can run at the same
settings you could on a stock card but
you can do it very very quietly now there is the disadvantage that you can't
install as many expansion cards in your system because you can see it's quite a
bit thicker than a uh a regular card so
it takes up one extra slot but you could still put an additional video card right
here and you can still run SLI even in this motherboard which is just a p-55
board it just has the right spacing as long as you got three slot spacing you
can even run SLI with two amp edition cards well the icy Visions temperatures
and fan speeds have finally stabilized a little bit I'm not I mean okay if I was
upgrading from the stock cooler I'd be Absol absolutely thrilled with the
results but uh based on the fact that I'm running this compared to the Zotac
amp Edition card I am not quite as impressed we stabilize around 80° on the
GPU let's see if I can get that to focus and at about
57% on the fan speed but it's the fan noise that's kind of bothering me here
because even at uh lower fan speed I find it has a bit of a pulsating uh
pulsating sound to it when it's in a closed case it's probably not going to
bother you but it's one of the things that I do notice when it's on the test
bench so here I'll just let you listen to
it not sure if you can hear that or not but
um anyway so 80° and my room is actually
a little bit cooler now whoops oh that's bad I'm trying to turn on my uh my
thermometer here and I went and moved my probe I'm trying to keep it in front of
the fan intake without jamming up the
fan which is what I just managed to do there we go so basically I want the uh
the temperature of the air that's going into the fan so 80° minus
about uh okay looks like it's about 27°
in here so that's 50 a Delta of 53 so
that's a little bit worse so
53° at 5
8% on the fan so I'm going to go ahead and turn it up to sort of a more
comparable 80% and then we'll see what it settles
on in terms of temperatures well very interesting that appears to be um as
high as the fan speed on the icy vision goes so you can see I've turned it up
even to 100% now it sounds exactly the same and it's
cooling exactly the same the uh room's
about a degree warmer now and it's at 82 de so that's all sort of well within
margin of error so it looks like that's as fast as the fans on the IC Vision run
I mean it has the advantage of being compatible with a lot of different gpus
but I'd say overall on the GTX 480 um if
you're looking at an option of either buying a stock card and then throwing an
icy Vision on it versus just buying an amp addition card in the first place it
comes to about the same price so I think the recommendation at this point should
be fairly clear here I just want to
explain these results a little bit better so remember this is not the temperature of the GPU this is the Delta
so that means that's the difference in temperature between room temp and the
temperature of your graphics card so a Delta of 60° means that if your room was
40° your GPU would be 100° if the Delta
is 34 it means that if your room is 34°
for example sort of a more realistic room temperature although quite warm uh
even in the summer 34° then your GPU
would be at 78° or if it was at 40 it
would be at 84° so you see how what I
mean there so this is a Delta this is not an absolute temperature so these two
are for the amp uh this is for
stock and this is for the
icy Vision okay hopefully that's all
pretty self-explanatory