The cooling system has never really presented much noise during the tests. The metal cover, combined with the low rotation system present on the fan, has allowed for a good acoustic comfort. The temperatures in idle are, however, definitely high, at 70°C. In full load, it reaches easily the 90°C mark. Such a high temperature can, thus, cause heating problems in the whole system if it’s not sufficiently aired, and it could cause annoying system blocks.

The card is developed to work up to a 105°C temperature, but the system is rather conservative and will never really reach the higher speeds, unless the truly passionate users decide to tune it with the nTune software provided by nVidia, or other similar softwares. The fan, if set up manually to work at full speed, can be quite noisy, actually going beyond the 65db. A good compromise of performance / noise can be obtained setting the fan’s rotational speed at 50%.

As for the energy consumption, the GeForce GTX280 is rather well behaved, although the implementation of a manufacturing technology under the 65nm would have helped. But, in any case, the average consumption is of 490W, for both CPU and GPU, when in heavy load.