Gainward Bliss GTX 275 review - Gainward GTX275
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 14 Oct 2009

Gainward’s interpretation of the GTX 275 comes built on a custom traditional red PCB. The component order is changed from what we know of reference models. The cooler is quite different from the NVIDIA model, as it uses two axial fans instead of a radial one, and doesn’t blow air outside of the system case, which is a design we do not welcome, but is not a big problem in well ventilated high end cases that this card will mostly be sitting in. The heat sink is made of aluminum with three heatpipes and it works very well. The temperatures, albeit outside a system case on a testbed, never rose above 64 degrees, while the card idled at just 39 degrees, 17 above room temperature. As the GTX 285 with a reference cooler was at 76 degrees in the same conditions, even with a part of the GPU disabled on the 275, the effectiveness of the cooler can clearly be seen.

The card is also very quiet, but slightly louder than the reference cooler. It is still a lot quieter than ATI’s competitors, especially the high clocked 4890.

There are two DVI-I connectors on the bracket, with a standard S-Video output. Gainward opted not to go for the HDMI or DisplayPort connections, as they can all be achieved with adapters and are not very common anyways. The GTX 275 is definitely not your first HTPC card of choice.

On the overclocking side, the 633 standard clock of the GTX 275 GPU is present on this Gainward model as well, since it is not a Golden Sample version. We found that we can overclock it to 745 MHz, which is over 100 MHz and a very good result. Since the rest of the GT200b GPUs, most notably the GTX 285 didn’t reach this frequency, perhaps we did get a handpicked model, or were just lucky. This limit wasn’t due to temperature, as the card was pretty cool, but probably because the GPU needed more voltage. On the GDDR3 overclocking, we reached just 10 MHz below the 2500 MHz effective clock, or 1245 MHz. All frequencies after that one caused tearing in the picture, although the card didn’t crash.

A picture of this Gainward card in all of its glory: