Temperature Results:
Temperature readings were taken at an ambient temperature of approximately 22 degrees Celsius, on a open test bench with the fans set to auto. Load and idle temperatures were monitored by MSI's Afterburner utility. Software used for stressing was 3DMark Vantage, looped until the temperature was stable and stopped rising.
Due to the passive nature of the card we didn't utilise any system fans to help air pass over the heatsink, but once inserted into a chassis with system fans the idle temperature dropped a further 7 degrees and as much as 15 degrees during load. Keep in mind that the card has a maximum temperature limit of 102 degrees Celsius.
Conclusions:
Palit's GeForce GT 520 1GB offers a great solution for workstation and HTPC users keen on the latest technologies without the premium price found with gamer-focused products. The Geforce GT 520 provides effortless Blu-ray playback and GPU acceleration for the latest applications and web experiences thanks to NVIDIA's CUDA technology as well as supporting DirectCompute and OpenCL for general-purpose computing that takes the load off the CPU. In addition to its video playback and workstation application capabilities, the GeForce GT 520 provides a significant boost in gaming performance compared to AMD's integrated solution that we tested against, not the mention including a better feature set all-round. But the biggest positive of Palit's design has to be the inclusion of a passive heatsink, moving away from the small and noisy fans that tend to be included with such low end products; a definite plus for quiet environments HTPC's reside in as well as office environments, not to mention making dust-removal maintenance simpler and much less frequently required.
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