Gadgetory

hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we are looking at something I completely pulled apart this is hey or was a GTX 750 zone by ZOTAC this is a new passively cooled GTX 750 it is the 750 as we know it from Nvidia with the GM 107 Maxwell chip on the board as you can see right here where the thermal paste sort of is was and this is the cooler there's no fan so it is a passive cooler and we we took it apart looked at how it's built benchmark the thermals benchmark the FPS and that's what I've got for you here today so in terms of how this is built its it's pretty much like every other heatsink for an actively cooled GPU except it's got no fan so you have your copper cold plate right here the copper gold plate of course has thermal interface or Tim or a thermal compound or thermal paste between it and the GPU which is on this board right here and the GPU is the the part that really generates heat so you put some thermal compound on there and that ensures that there's smooth contact between the copper cold plate which is a 400 watts per meter Kelvin thermal conductivity rating and the GPU and if you don't have that there are small imperfections in the surface of the cold plate that will catch and hold air and air is a lot hotter than thermal paste which is about seven watts per meter Kelvin air is like not even one so you want that interface in there otherwise you trap in and generate heat in the form of air the cold plate ducts all the heat away from the GPU it then goes into the heat pipes which I've explained this in depth in the past and the article link to the description below if you're interested but we'll go over it briefly here heat pipes have a sort of liquid in them that goes through a phase change when heated up and that's where you lose a lot of your energy in the form of heat and that liquid when it phase changes goes using capillary action down the the heat pipe eventually hits the tip condenses back into a liquid and travels back to the cold plate area it doesn't actually go into the cold plate but it goes to the cold plate area and then turns back into a gas once heated up again and as the heat pipe gets hotter your air nor from a fan but not in this case your air will blow through these aluminum fins and duct the heat away from the fins which are ducting the heat away from the heat pipe so basically it's GPU generates heat cold plate steels the heat heat pipes steel that heat it travels down them the aluminum fins docked away from those heat pipes and then air blows through the fins and pulls away from the heat pipe so that they can cool down the liquid and reuse it for another pass in this case we're relying on air from the case because there is no fan so you do need some some form of cooling in your case in order to use this this video card is really dedicated for use at the home theater market so if you're a home theater PC gamer if you're trying to build a dead silent and I mean that because this makes zero noise if you're trying to build a dead silent home theater PC for gaming in the living room that type of thing and this is kind of where you want to be headed in terms of passive devices if you don't need the dead silence and you could probably get a slightly better GPU but we'll talk about that in a moment in terms of thermal performance let's see what we have here I benchmark this with just a couple flagship cards and one other Nvidia card that was closer to the range so we've got the 750 passive GP running firm mark at 100% load cooled at twenty nine point eight Celsius when under full load adjusted for ambient that is actually very good that's that's pretty pretty cool considering there's no fan and for reference we look at the 750 Ti on auto settings which is the most realistic and that was at thirty two point two Celsius 29 Celsius 30 Celsius is not bad at all because your CP is probably gonna be around that anyway if not a little higher so and that's really all that matters you want the GPU to not be generating so much heat that it's warming up all the surrounding components so that's pretty good performance just for reference the 750 Ti a 100% load with 24.7 Celsius the 250 X on auto which was a comparable priced card was 47.2 Celsius quite a lot hotter and it has active cooling on it but that's Andy's architecture they run a little bit hotter moving on to FPS I tested this in several games you can see all of them in the links in the description below but we'll just go through a few here really quickly in this case the 750 passive cards limit was about 27 FPS went on very high with Metro last light which is really good actually that means you can probably play the game on a mix of low and medium settings at around 60 fps that's what I define as playable that's what the site defines as playable is 60 FPS so you have to be lower medium for metro which isn't amazing but really not bad for 750 looking at grid Autosport which is one of the best optimized games i've ever tested a grid Autosport the 750 passive card operates at almost 40 FPS average on maximum settings so if you drop down to high settings it's suddenly pushing nearly 80 FPS that is more than playable you could actually adjust some of those settings back to ultra and you'd have a really good looking experience with a fairly high performance car it need to be at 60 FPS which is all you need in this type of game and that's not bad for a hundred twenty bucks and zero noise now i do want to point out with 750 t is significantly better value across the board in terms of performance it's always going to be better value than a passively called 750 because when you introduce passive cooling it's suddenly more expensive so the 750 is 120 bucks passively cooled and the 750 Ti is like 130 hundred 44 two gigabytes of RAM so it's got twice as much actively cooled so it is gonna make some noise which is where your Dutchman is but a lot more performance had nearly 100 FPS on high settings which means you can run it on max all day long looking at battlefield 4 ultra the 750 passive card struggled at 31 fps went on ultra settings and had slight gains to almost 40 fps went on high settings battlefield is another one you'd be playing on probably medium settings with a few low settings in there maybe a medium with no AAA it probably had about 60 FPS which is definitely playable so not horrible but not amazing performance there so all-in-all the GTX 750 by ZOTAC performs pretty well in most games I was impressed by it the thermal performance is actually very impressive the value is there if you want a completely silent system if you don't care that your fan makes some noise in the background or if you have a way to stifle that maybe with a case or with other cooling solutions that are aftermarket like liquid then you probably want to be looking towards a better card the 750ti is within budget and very high performing comparatively and and it's actively cooled but it does well on games and it's cheap it's less than $150 all day long for two gigabytes the 750 is 120 one gigabyte which is plenty for home theater use I don't want you to focus on that number too much one gigabyte will get you by just fine for home theater PC gaming because you're limited more by the GPU than the the RAM at that point so other than that the 250 X isn't even really worth considering unless it has some features or optimization in a specific game it is $100 so I guess it's a bit cheaper if you're on a super tight budget but the 750 at that point is also worth looking at which is around the same price when not passive so that's sort of what you need to think about just to give you a very clear conclusion here with a home theater PC that you want to make no noise and be in your living room this is a very good card with a gaming PC that can make some noise the 750ti is within budget and is a bit better I would recommend that so that's sort of where you need to draw the line and figure out what's best for your needs very impressive thermal performance fairly impressive gaming performance and that's all I will see you all next time peace