KFA2 GTX570 1280MB Review

KFA stands for ‘Kick Friggin Ass’. Can it live up to its acronym? Find out as we give the KFA2 NVIDIA GTX 570 1.2GB graphics card the Vortez treatment.

Product on Review: KFA2 GTX570 1280MB
Manufacturer and Sponsor: KFA2
Street Price: £239 Inc. VAT

KFA2 are often assumed to be a relative newcomer to the graphics card market but they are actually one of the oldest. KFA2 are actually the European premium brand of the Galaxy group who have been making graphics cards since 1994. That in itself is impressive considering they are backed by nearly 20 years of experience so you can rest assured you are getting a quality product but also their support is based in Europe which means should you encounter any difficulties you will not have to RMA your card halfway around the world.

KFA2 manufacture their own graphics cards, unlike some card partners who simply slap a sticker on the cooler and call it their own. You will not find a reference graphics card hailing with the KFA2 tag either and as you will see with today’s sample, their designs are strikingly different from the usual, reference designs.

This isn’t of course the first custom cooled GTX570 we have seen and it has some pretty stiff competition in the MSI GTX570 Power Edition and GIGABYTE GTX570 SOC we recently reviewed. It does however have an ace up its sleeve in that it is the cheaper of the three despite being custom cooled and having a custom PCB. Unfortunately, it is not overclocked with its clockspeeds reference 732/1464MHz, something we hope to rectify later in the overclocking section of the review. For now though we will reserve judgement.

About KFA2
KFA2 exists for 2 main reasons:

1. To bring the best quality and performing products to market

2. KFA2 is going to “Kick Friggin Ass” and take names later!

KFA2 are a sole European focused brand, providing European based support, warehousing and RMA facilities. Our primary goal is to provide products based upon two key elements “Performance and Quality” with peace of mind, knowing that all support related services are located within Europe.

KFA or “Kick Friggin Ass” objective is simple. They have come here to kick ass and chew bubble-gum, and guess what? Yes, they are all out of bubble-gum so join with us as we take an in-depth look at our first KFA product here at Vortez to see if it can make good on their company Acronym.

Let’s first take a look at the product specification…

Specification

The GF110 chip shares a lot of its roots with the GF100 core. The GPU still packs an impressive 3.2 billion transistors in a die seize 520mm squared. Its default internal configuration has been ported from GF100 in that the GPU features 512 CUDA cores or shader processors as we are more accustomed to. There are organised in a 4x16x32 block where 16 denotes the number of stream multi-processors (SM) and 32 being the number of cores on each SM. Each SM has its own L1 Cache and a common L2 Cache is shared by all 16. The GPU is still manufactured on the 40nm process.

The GTX570 has 15 out of the total 16 SM enabled for a final 480 CUDA core count. Similarly to the GTX480, it also shares the same number of texture units, which in this case is 60. These represent 32 fewer cores than the fully unlocked GTX580 and 4 texture units less. The size of the L2 Cache is reminiscent of the GTX470 coming at 640KB rather than 768KB as found on the flagship GTX580. Directly related to Cache is the number of ROPs which has been reduced from 48 to 40 on the GTX570. On the other hand, the GTX570 has been presented with a significant clock boost over both the GTX470 and the GTX480 in core and memory clock speeds to avoid “crippled” performance. Consequently, the ROPs are also clocked higher which should minimise the gap between the GTX480 and itself. Thanks to the GF110 GPU, the GTX570 also benefits from the GF104’s superior texture filtering capabilities and further enhancements have been made to the tessellation engine for improved performance in an area where Nvidia already reigns supreme.

The memory subsystem on the GTX570 is more akin to the GTX470 with its 5 memory controllers each sporting a 256MB GDDR5 framebuffer to give 1280MB of available memory. The memory interface is composed of ten 32-bit channels for a 320-bit interface.

GTX580: 16 SMs x 32 = 512 Core, 16 SMs x 4 = 64 texture units
32-bit channel x 12 = 384-bit interface, 256MB x 6 memory controllers = 1536MB memory

GTX570: 15 SMs x 32 = 480 Core, 15 SMs x 4 = 60 texture units
32-bit channel x 10 = 320-bit interface, 256MB x 5 memory controllers = 1280MB memory

The KFA2 GTX570 appears to be identical to the reference GTX570. So the question has to be asked, why go to the trouble of making your own card? The card is however much smaller than a reference GTX570 measuring 26.8 x 11 x 4 cm. Looking at the specification, the only problem I can foresee is the 1.25GB of GDDR5 which may cause some issues at the highest resolutions.

Product Specifications

Product Code: KFA2 GeForce GTX 570 1280MB PCIe 2.0
Cooler: Custom
GPU: GTX570
Core Clock: 732MHz
Memory Clock: 3800MHz
Memory Size: 1280 MB
Memory Type: GDDR5
Memory Interface: 320 bit
Memory Bandwidth: 152 GB/sec
Interface: PCI Express x16 (PCI Express 2.1)
Output: Dual DVI-I + mini HDMI

Let’s take a look at the cards feature set…

Features

3D Graphics
•Full Microsoft® DirectX® 11 Shader Model 5.0 support: o NVIDIA PolyMorph Engine with distributed HW tessellation engines
•BC6H and BC7 texture compression formats
•Gather4 extensions
•OpenGL 4.1 support
•Advanced image quality features: o 32× coverage sample antialiasing
•Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
•16× angle independent anisotropic filtering
•128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with antialiasing; 32-bit per-component floating point texture filtering and blending
•Interactive ray tracing support
•Full-speed frame buffer blending
•Full-speed FP16 texture filtering
•Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and zdata
•Support for normal map compression
•Adaptive z-cull
•Early-Z

GPU Computing
•NVIDIA CUDA™ technology—allows the GPU cores to provide performance improvements for applications such as video transcoding, gaming, ray tracing, and physics. API support includes: o CUDA C
•CUDA C++
•DirectCompute 5.0
•OpenCL
•Java, Python, and Fortran
•Third Generation Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) o 32 CUDA cores per SM
•Dual Warp Scheduler simultaneously schedules and dispatches instructions from two independent warps
•64 KB of RAM with a configurable partitioning of shared memory and L1 cache
•Second Generation Parallel Thread Execution ISA o Unified Address Space with Full C++ Support
•Optimized for OpenCL and DirectCompute
•Full IEEE 754-2008 32-bit and 64-bit precision
•Full 32-bit integer path with 64-bit extensions
•Memory access instructions to support transition to 64-bit addressing
•Improved Performance through Predication
•Improved Memory Subsystem o NVIDIA Parallel DataCacheTM hierarchy with Configurable L1 and Unified L2 Caches
•Greatly improved atomic memory operation performance
•NVIDIA GigaThreadTM Engine o 10x faster application context switching
•Concurrent kernel execution
•Out of order thread block execution

Nvidia Technology
•NVIDIA SLI® technology—patented hardware and software technology allows up to four NVIDIA GeForce GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today’s top games.
•NVIDIA PhysX™ technology—allows advanced physics effects to be simulated and rendered on the GPU.
•NVIDIA 3D Vision™ Ready— GeForce GPU support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, bringing a fully immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC.
•NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround™ Ready—scale games across 3 panels by leveraging the power of multiple GPUs in an NVIDIA SLI configuration. Combine with 3D Vision technology for the ultimate 3 panel stereoscopic 3D gaming experience.

Advanced Display Functionality
•Two pipelines for dual independent display
•Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560×1600
•Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048×1536 at 85 Hz
•HDMI 1.4a support including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support, x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound. See www.nvidia.com/3dtv for more details.
•DisplayPort 1.1a support
•HDCP support up to 2560×1600 resolution on all digital outputs
•10-bit internal display processing, including support for 10-bit scan out
•Underscan/overscan compensation and hardware scaling

Video
• NVIDIA® Pure Video® HD technology with VP4 programmable video processor
•Decode acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile, H.264, MVC, VC1, DivX (version 3.11 and later), and Flash (10.1 and later)
•Blu-ray dual-stream hardware acceleration (supporting HD picture-in-picture playback)
•Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
•Noise reduction
•Edge enhancement
•Bad edit correction
•Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
•High-quality scaling
•Motion Compensation
•Video color correction
•Dynamic contrast enhancement and color stretch

Digital Audio
•Support for the following audio modes: o Dolby Digital (AC3), DTS 5.1, Multi-channel (7.1) LPCM, Dolby Digital Plus (DD+), MPEG2/MPEG4 AAC
•Data rates of 44.1 KHz, 48 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, 176 KHz, and 192 KHz
•Word sizes of 16bit, 20bit, and 24bit

Power Management Technology
•Advanced power and thermal management for optimal acoustics, power, and performance based on usage:
•ASPM power management
•Adaptive Clocking
•Adaptive Power States
•Advanced fan control
•Power and temperature monitoring

Let’s take a look at the packaging and contents…

Packaging & Contents

Box Front

The front of the box is relatively plain by graphics card standards being a dull grey with contrasting NVIDIA green trim. Only the bare minimum specifications and features are displayed towards the bottom. The KFA2 theme is very urban though with the KFA2 title being in a graffiti style font.

In contrast to the front of the box, the rear has a wall of text describing the cards features and specification in a wall of text in an original manner. KFA2 believe there are 8 good reasons why you should have a graphics card and use this to describe the cards main attractions.

Packaging

Removing the package from the outer sleeve we are greeted with a plain black box. This sturdy box contains the package contents and upon opening the lid I am happy to report the contents were secure and very well packed both by means of stiff polystyrene inserts and anti-static packaging which should mean the product arrives to you in perfect condition.

Accessories

The accessories included with the package have pretty much all you could need. There’s a user manual, installation manual, VGA-DVI adapter, 2x twin Molex-6pin adapters, driver and utilities disc and a mini-HDMI cable. The only oversight was the omission of a game to put your GPU to the test.

Let’s move on to the card itself…

Closer Look Pt.1

Card Top

Looking like something that has just jumped out of a Transformers movie, the KFA2 GTX570 has a very odd looking heatsink cover. The shroud may look like it’s metal but it is simply plastic with a metal finish to it. The card measures 230mm in length so is perfect for those looking for a powerful graphics card but are short on real estate. The blue 80mm fan is positioned directly over the longitudinal heatsink fins and because of the full cover shroud, heat will be both ejected out of the case to the I/O area and also towards the front of the card.

Card Rear

KFA2 have chosen a blue PCB to match the fan and it is reminiscent of GIGABYTE, SAPPHIRE and HIS who all tend to use blue PCB’s. I’m not a big fan of a coloured PCB simply because it limits the colour scheme you may opt for when building a PC. Obviously, if you don’t have a case with a side window this will not matter but for some, PCB colour can be just as important as performance. Again, we see that the manufacturer as also decided not to implement a back plate. While there would be no cooling benefit in this case as there is nothing to cool in this sample, a back plate would protect from short circuits and static electricity when installing/removing the card from the system.

SLI

As with all GTX570’s, the KFA2 GTX570 is capable of being linked to other cards from the same family either in dual or (should you motherboard allow) multiple GPU configurations. Sadly, as with most NVIDIA based GPU’s, there is no SLI bridge in the accessories so please ensure your motherboard manufacturer has provided you with one if you intend to use SLI.

I/O Area

The KFA2 is capable of displaying a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 courtesy of 2x DVI ports. Should you wish to use HDMI then KFA2 have also added a mini-HDMI port and included a mini-HDMI to HDMI cable. Above the display ports is the main vent which is larger than the standard GTX570 I/O plate ensuring as much hot air is exhausted as possible with the least amount of restriction.

PCIe Power Ports

Unusually for a GTX570, the power ports are located at the end of the card, directly in front of the exhaust vent. I would have preferred to have seen the ports being positioned to the side of the card as those looking for a small card will now also have to add on the size of the PCIe power plugs which defeats the object of creating a small, compact card! Nevertheless, the side of the card looks a lot more flush without having PCIe power plugs in the way and will certainly assist those who may not have very wide enclosures.

Fan latch system

I almost missed this impressive feature due to the complexity of the cooling shroud. Looking closely at the shroud I realised there is a latch mechanism which allows the user to safely move the fan out of the way to clean the heatsink. This is an extremely good idea as it will save people from removing the heatsink who could potentially damage the components hidden beneath. It will also ensure that given the correct attention to maintenance, the card should never overheat, even after years of use. Fantastic!

Blue LED fan

The fan has 3 LED’s on the frame which emit a nice blue glow from beneath the graphics card. It’s great to see manufacturers adding extra features like this to their cards and while colour choice is certainly a personal thing, the blue haze is not intrusive.

Let’s see if there are any other surprises when we take a look beneath that impressive shroud…

Closer Look Pt.2

Bare naked lady

Removing the cooler was a relatively simple affair but there are 12 smaller screws holding the shroud and additional heatsinks to the PCB making a total of 16 screws including the main GPU core baseplate. I found the contact with the core to be very good with the paste in the ‘Goldilocks zone’, not too dry, not to much – just right! Both the memory and VRM module have their own passive heatsinks which are held in place by screws and have thermal tape is a means of conducting heat.

Heatsinks

The main heatsink is as long as the graphics card PCB and is a mixture of aluminium longitudinal fins and what appears to be copper heatpipes attached to a copper baseplate with an aluminium frame.

The four heatpipes are 6mm in diameter and I was surprised they were not spaced out evenly to dissipate heat effectively rather they are positioned towards the ends of the heatsink. I will be interested to see if this method yields better results than the other cards on test.

Soldered heatpipes

Rather than rely on manual labour to solder the heatpipes to the aluminium heatsink, KFA2 have employed the neater(and presumably cheaper) automatic method of dipping the heatpipes. While this sample appears to have effective contact between the heatpipes and the fins, I have seen heatsinks that have not had the best application using this method.

Baseplate

Arguments will rage as to whether a polished or rough base is the best method of transferring heat. Personally, I’m with the polished crowd on this as thermal interface material will never be as good as the material it bonds to for transferring heat so the less TIM the better is usually the case. Having a rough contact area means that more TIM is inevitably used to fill the minute crevices in the surface, ergo it will not be as efficient. This is of course assuming there are no other elements that will affect mated surfaces such as concave/bowed heatsinks or integrated heatspreaders. KFA2 have opted for the dull finish with this card and while it is by no means rough, it is not a perfect finish as you can see.

Copper?

You could be forgiven I had gone over the top with my exposure settings when taking these pictures but the copper really is that bright, un-naturally so. I therefore scratched the surface (literally) to see what lies beneath and I am happy to report both the baseplate and heatpipes are full blown copper and not just copper plated. I can only assume the plating is there to prevent oxidisation of the copper.

Power Module

The VRM module has 6 inductors and KFA2 recommend a minimum 550w PSU capable of delivering 35A on the 12v rail for the graphics card to operate. Obviously, adding subsequent cards will mean a much beefier PSU will be required. We will, as always, be testing the power consumption of the card later in the review.

Memory

The KFA2 GTX570 comes with 1280MB of GDDR5. The Samsung modules are the K4G10325FE-HC04 variant and as such are specified to run with a voltage of up to 1.5V and a maximum rated frequency of 1250 (5000) MHz.

GF110

Finally we arrive to the heart of the GTX570, the GF110 core. Having the same core as the mighty GTX580 but 32 less CUDA cores, the GTX570 has proven to be very popular thanks to its very good performance vs. price ratio. With this particular variant being the cheapest GTX570 we have tested to date we can only hope that statement is strengthened as we put the card through our batch of benchmark tests.

Let’s take a look at the test setup we are going to use today…

Test Setup

We have recently made a slight amendment to our selection of hardware and our test setup. The reason for this is that we felt the current crop of resolutions were not stressing the latest generation of graphics cards enough. With this in mind, we have added a Dell 3007 WFP-HC to our system, allowing us to stress the cards by utilising a 2560×1600 resolution. We will however, still include 1920×1200 results as this is one of the most popular resolutions used by gamers.

Display – Dell 3007 WFP-HC
Case – Corsair 650D
CPU Cooler – Corsair H100
CPU – Intel Core i7 920 @ 4GHz
RAM – 6GB (3x2GB) Kingston DDR3 1600mhz 8-8-8-20 C1
Motherboard – ASUS Rampage III Extreme
Power Supply –Antec High Current Pro 1200W
Hard Drive – GSkill Falcon 128GB & Hitachi 250GB

Please note: PSU requirements
While a 550w PSU is recommended by MSI for a single card configuration I feel it is important to stress the need to use a quality PSU. All to often we are contacted by people encountering difficulties in powering and overclocking high spec systems who insist they are using a high wattage PSU. Do not be fooled by inferior, poor quality power supply units that claim high wattage figures. At best a poor PSU will not be able to maintain those values and perhaps more importantly could potentially be a fire hazard! PSU rail stability can have a dramatic effect on overclocking too so while it may appear that the component is at fault, it could very easily be the PSU that has high amounts of ripple which is causing the hardware/overclocking errors.

A PSU is the single most important component in a modern high powered PC. If you are going to spend money in any area of your PC, the PSU should be considered first as a quality sample will likely out last any other aspect of your PC and thus investment in a good example is a very wise decision. For this reason ANTEC have kindly sponsored our test bed by providing the immense, top quality High Current Pro 1200W PSU which will satisfy even the most power hungry of PC configurations! PSU’s of this calibre are at the very top of the performance hierachy and while they may seem expensive compared to inferior quality PSUs, they are worth their weight in gold as a PSU such as the ANTEC High Current Pro 1200W provides both future proofing and perhaps most importantly, piece of mind that your valuable PC components are in safe hands.

Graphics Cards:

KFA2 GTX570 1280MB – Forceware 280.26

MSI GTX570 1280MB Power Edition OC – Forceware 280.26 – **NOTE – New Driver Installed**
ZOTAC GTX580 3GB AMP2! + SLI – Forceware 275.33
GIGABYTE GTX570 1280MB ‘SOC’ Edition – Forceware 275.33
ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition 950/4200MHz – Forceware 275.33
SLI NVIDIA GTX560 1GB 950/4200MHz – Forceware 275.33
HIS HD6970 2GB IceQ Mix@ 880/5500MHz – ATI Catalyst 11.5
Lucid HydraLogix = HIS HD6970 2GB IceQ Mix & MSI nGTX580 3072MB Lightning Xtreme Edition @ Factory clockspeeds
MSI nGTX580 3072MB Lightning Xtreme Edition @832/4200MHz & 975/4400MHz Overclocked – Forceware 275.33
ASUS HD6990 @830/5000MHz & AWSUM enabled (pre-overclocked) 880/5500MHz & Further Overclock of 930/6000MHz – ATI Catalyst 11.5
HIS HD6970 2048MB IceQ Turbo @ 900/5600MHz Pre-overclocked & 1000/6000MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.5
Gigabyte GTX560 1024MB @ 830/4008MHz & 841/5016MHz Overclocked – Forceware 275.27
MSI R6970 2048MB Lightning @ 940/5500MHz Pre-overclocked & 1010/6000MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.4 (8.840.3.0)
Inno3D GTX560Ti 1024MB @ 820/4008MHz & 950/4300MHz Pre-overclocked –Forceware 266.66
Inno3D GTX570 1280MB @ 732/3800MHz, 800/4000MHz Pre-overclocked & 901/4220MHz Overclocked – Forceware 263.09
ASUS GTX580 1536MB @ 782/4000MHz & 903/4220MHz Overclocked – Forceware 262.99
ASUS HD6970 2048MB @ 890/5500MHz & 949/5896MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.4 (8.840.3.0)

Driver versions are extremely important when comparing a graphics card. It is however often important to update a driver version, especially when a new GPU is released and thus any change in driver will be clearly stated.

Overclocking
For today’s review we will use the Afterburner utility from the MSI to overclock the test subject.

Games:
Crysis Warhead
Metro 2033
Dirt 3
Mafia II
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Far Cry 2
Alien vs. Predator

The games above represent equal bias toward both AMD and NVidia and are among the most demanding games available at present. Future releases will be evaluated for consistency and accuracy and then potentially added to the list when they become available

Synthetic benchmarks:
Futuremark 3DMark 11
Unigine Heaven 2.5
Tessmark 0.2.2
Furmark 1.9.0

Synthetic benchmarks are used to stress each feature of a GPU which may not be present in today’s games. While nothing is certain, the benchmarks above do at least give us an insight into the possible future performance of the graphics card on test, invaluable when evaluating the potential lifespan of a graphics card.

Temperature, power consumption and acoustics:
Furmark 1.9.0

The above application is feared by most manufacturers as it has been known to destroy GPU’s. While it is not indicative of ‘real world’ performance, it does represent the maximum possible stress your GPU could be placed under making it the hardest test to pass. For that reason alone, it is worthy of inclusion in our suite of benchmarks. Power consumption will be evaluated from the wall and will be a total system draw of the specification above.

Sound will be measured from a distance of 20 cm from the actual GPU with the case open. All system fans will be set to their lowest settings. Readings will be taken at both idle and 100% load.

Bundled Software

The bundled software includes some outdated ForceWare drivers (263.09), the Xtreme Tuner HD and a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader (required to view the digital manual of the KFA2 GTX570). That’s all you get with the card I’m afraid. KFA2 cards do however come with a free copy of Batman: Arkham City at selected stores so it’s not all bad.

KFA2 have their own overclocking utility, the aptly named Xtreme Tuner HD. The main screen you see above is well laid out with pretty much everything you need to get you on your way when overclocking. The core, shader and memory can be adjusted in 1MHz increments. Unfortunately, despite the core and memory voltage settings being shown, neither of these options responded to input. The bottom three buttons allow the user to directly download the latest GPU driver (if you speak Chinese), enable the drop down performance monitor(below), restore default values or flash to a different BIOS.

The drop down performance monitor contains everything you would hope to see from GPU temperatures, fan speed and component frequencies.

Last of all we see the settings menu. This allows the user to set the start-up options, the performance monitor sampling frequency and allows the user to set the on screen display of Clockspeeds, temperatures, fan speed and framerate. In testing however I could not get this feature to work. iPhone control is also available but again, after 20 minutes of trying to figure out how to get it to work and considering there is no mention of this feature in either the hard copy or digital copy of the manual, I regretfully I gave up.

Overall, the Xtreme Tuner is anything but I’m afraid. The front end is a little buggy and some of the features simply do not work, or at least require more hassle than they will inevitably be worth. While the main feature (overclocking) does work, I don’t see it replacing the hugely popular MSI Afterburner anytime soon. In short the Xtreme Tuner HD is a token gesture but simply not user friendly enough to be used as an everyday utility I’m afraid.

Let’s see if the cards overclocking can make up for the poor software implementation…

Overclocking & Temperature Analysis

Arriving with reference NVIDIA clockspeeds from KFA2 we set about upping the ante by using the same utility we use for all NVIDIA based graphics cards, the MSI Afterburner Utility.

First of we see the stock settings are precisely as NVIDIA intended with 732MHz on the core and a memory clockspeed of 3600MHz.

Using MSI’s own Afterburner tool (2.2.0 Beta 7), I slowly increased the core clockspeed until I encountered difficulties.

The maximum overclock I achieved was a respectable 877MHz on the core and 4148MHz on the memory. These speeds are however some way off our best overclocking GTX570s. Both the GIGABYTE and MSI cards easily surpassed these speeds. While I could get over the 900MHz boundary, instability proved to be a problem in some games and as such I was forced to down clock the card slightly to reach stability.

Core temperatures

To measure the temperature of the card we first measure the ambient temperature. Our review station resides in an air conditioned room with the temperature set to a comfortable 23c.

The KFA2 GTX570 perfectly mirrored the GTX570 from MSI in terms of temperatures although I’m inclined to say that should the clockspeeds also have been matched, the MSI would be the better performing card. This isn’t of course to say the KFA2 cooler is by any means inefficient as it clearly is. Keeping an overclocked GF110 core well under 80c while under 100% load is a great achievement!

Let’s move on to the acoustics and power consumption of today’s review sample…

Acoustics & Power Consumption

Acoustics

A feature often overlooked when purchasing a graphics card is the noise that it emits. We all hear (no pun intended) of graphics cards that run like a jet engine which can have a detrimental effect on a gaming session, regardless of the FPS it churns out. It is therefore extremely important that a graphics card should operate as quietly as possible.

To test for this we will be using a sound meter and microphone setup which will be placed 20cm away from the GPU. The test will take place in a quiet (not sound proof) room with the results for the GPU fan at low (30%) and highest (100%) settings.

Results

Inaudible save for a very light hum, the KFA2 GTX570 performed admirably at idle. Even when stretched, the fan didn’t rise to anything above a murmur. During testing throughout our suite of benchmarks, the KFA2 GTX570 didn’t manage to drown out our setups case fans which is a great achievement. The noise did however increase significantly when manually setting the fan to 100%. A high pitched whine was emitted from the PC enclosure but thankfully this never happened during our testing so it is unlikely you will hear this unless your PC case resembles an oven!

Power Consumption

For this test, we will be using a wall meter with the test setup plugged in minus the Monitor. Readings were taken at both stock and overclocked conditions each having readings also taken in idle and 100% load (Furmark). FurMark is perhaps not indicative of a true gaming environment and indeed is not recommended by NVIDIA or AMD to test stability of a card but in my view, much like Prime95 for CPU’s, it puts the graphics card under the highest possible stress and presents a good ‘worst case’ scenario. So while it is unlikely your card will ever be stressed as much under normal conditions, it is a good indicator of a theoretical maximum.

Results

At idle the KFA2 GTX570 was the best GTX570 we have tested thus far which is most likely due to the clockspeeds of the card being set to default along with the voltages. Proving a point, the power consumption surpassed that of the MSI card despite being clocked significantly lower. Not a bad result but not the best either.

Let’s see if the card performs in our suite of benchmarks…

Crysis 2

Crytek took an internet beating from its loyal fans due to the fact that they pandered to the console masses and dumbed down the graphics to DirectX 9. Fortunately, fans of the PC version of Crysis managed to force Cryteks hand and they have since developed a DX11 patch and have also enhanced the textures with added tesselation. It is for this reason that we have decided to include it in our suite of benchmarks.

To test the cards we used the Crysis 2 benchmark courtesy of Adrenaline with both the 1.9 patch, DX11 update and Hi-res texture pack. Settings were manually placed to Ultra, DX11 and tessellation enabled with the Central Park map being run 3 times per resolution benchmark test.

Crysis Warhead

Following the success of Crysis, the stand alone expansion “Warhead” was hotly anticipated to bring more game play, more weapons, improved visuals whilst maintaining better performance, the latter being what gamers wanted most. After all how many people upgraded their rigs just to play this game… In the game, you play as the upbeat Brit Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes, chasing down a Korean nuclear warhead. Throw in some ice shooting aliens and we’re bound to have a great game. It sure delivered.

Testing was done using Framebuffer’s Crysis Warhead benchmarking tool. The tests were configured to DirectX 10 at Enthusiast levels. Each test on the Ambush map was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Far Cry 2

One of the most hyped games of 2008, Far Cry 2 had some big shoes to fill. It was built to be the next best thing since well… Far Cry I suppose. Combining an open-world game play with highly detailed graphics, physics and AI, what more could we possibly want? The game puts us in the body of a malaria inflicted mercenary hunting down the “Jackal” in the heart of Africa, in a bid to stop an on-going conflict between two rival factions. The storyline can be hard to follow sometimes but I’m no game reviewer, so let’s concentrate on the graphics and performance. After all, we all need to know if our hardware will be able to handle the scorching savannah burning at the hands of our flamethrowers.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Far Cry 2, configuring the settings to Ultra and DX10. The small ranch level was chosen and each configuration was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Metro 2033

Based on the novel by the same name, Metro 2033 is a first person shooter with elements of survival horror. As Artyom, you trawl through the mutant infested metro systems of post-apocalyptic Moscow. The game delivers presents a grim ambience that reflects on the overall atmosphere of the underground setting. Metro 2033 uses the setting as a back drop to showcase some of the best visuals of any games out now, making it the ideal benchmark for those looking for the best graphics card.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Metro 2033, configuring the settings to Very High and making use of DirectX 11. The frontline scene was looped 3 times for each configuration. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Alien Vs. Predator

Spawned from the popular Alien and Predator franchises, Rebellion have collaborated to bring the legendary war to us through the medium of a first-person shooter. The game forces you to hunt, prey and most importantly survive in the swamp colony of Freya’s prospect as a Predator, Alien or Marine. The stunning visuals add to the sense of dread and terror that we have become so accustomed to seeing with the series.

The stand-alone Alien VS Predator benchmark tool was used for testing here. All the settings were set to very high and Tessellation was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is the new rendition of the widely successful Battlefield series of game. Having more in common with the console release of Bad Company, the sequel hopes to inject the DNA of the timeless Battlefield 2 online experience with the witty action packed single player shooting adventure of the original. As Private Preston Marlowe, your goal as a member of Bad Company is to once again save the world by securing a scalar weapon device.

Fraps was used to test performance. Each test was conducted at the start of the ‘Cold War’ level ensuring that the same actions and paths were taken during the 2 minute sample. All settings were set to the highest available in game with AF set to 16x and HBAO turned on. The average FPS was recorded by FRAPS at the end of each walk through.

DiRT 3

As players race to elevate their global standing, DiRT 3 is back delivering mud, sweat and gears world over: from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US, to executing performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits.

The in-game benchmarking tool was used to test performance. All the display settings were set to the maximum available and DirectX 11 was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Mafia II

Following the success of Mafia back in 2002, the third person action adventure game is back with a new grittier and darker world. As Vito Scaletta, an aspiring made man, your job is to work through the twist and turns of Mafia lifestyle. The more blood spilt, the more you get in return but the lifestyle was never meant to be an ideal one. Set in the visually stunning Empire City, the wartime references provide the ever present back drop to a rife period in America’s history, in which potential for exploitation becomes Vito’s key focus.

The in-game benchmarking tool was used to test performance. All the display settings were set to the maximum available in-game. PhsyX was only enabled if specified in the charts. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

TessMark 0.2.2

TessMark 0.2.2 is an OpenGL benchmark and tech demo that uses the new hardware tessellation (or GPU tessellation) features exposed by the OpenGL 4 API. Hardware tessellation makes it possible to divide a polygon into smaller ones (according to the tessellation level factor) in order to increase polygons density: the higher the tessellation level, the higher the polygon density. A high tessellation level requires much GPU processing power.

TessMark was run in fullscreen, benchmark mode using map set 1 and configured to use OpenGL 4.

3DMark 2011 & Unigine Heaven 2.5

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

Unigine Heaven 2.5

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Conclusion

The KFA2 GTX570 is one of those cards that impresses on some levels but is let down on others. Take the aesthetics for example. The cooler is very attractive and certainly a break away from the norm. The fan along with the LED’s only add to the originality and make for a very impressive looking piece of kit. Sadly, the blue PCB will not be to everyone’s tastes. The length of the card is great and would fit all but the smallest of enclosures but I fail to see the point in reducing the length of a card only to add the PCIe power ports at the end of the unit which only serves to add to the length that was reduced in the first place.

The price of the card has got to be a major plus point is very competitive however, to offset this cost you will have to settle for mediocre overclocking when compared to the competition. Perhaps I’m being a little too harsh here but I dearly wanted to see this card to perform extremely well given the excellent cooling design, both in terms of the heatsink assembly and the innovative fan latching system. The power consumption was nothing ground-breaking either and while the card was extremely quiet, even under load, the fact that hot air is partially exhausted back into the system means other case fans will perhaps have to compensate to keep enclosure temperatures under control.

We are big fans of the GTX570 family here at Vortez thanks to its excellent bang-per-buck and here is where the KFA2 finds its footing, beating the competition. £240 is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination but considering it can game at high resolutions it is relatively low when compared to other graphics cards capable of hi-res gaming. In today’s current economic climate, people are looking for products that offer great value for money and this is where the KFA2 GTX570 scores high. The chink in the graphics cards armour though, as with some other GTX570’s, is it’s crippled in some games by the lack of VRAM when gaming at the highest resolutions with all the trimmings applied. It was only a couple of years ago when people scoffed at the need for 1GB graphics cards. Times change though and with 2GB of VRAM rapidly becoming a necessity and gaming at a HD res of 1920x1080p being the most popular, buyers would do well to consider how long 1.25GB of GDDR5 will be enough. Today it is adequate, tomorrow who knows?

In short, should the KFA2 have overclocked higher or indeed at least matched the competition I believe we would have had a definite winner here. It looks the part, cools well and is quiet in operation. Sadly, despite its product title it doesn’t Kick Frigging Ass on this occasion. What it does do is give great value for money, especially when you consider the card has a custom cooler, non-reference PCB and still manages to match the price of a reference NVIDIA GTX570. For that reason it receives our value award.

Pros:
+Comparatively cheap Hi-res gaming capability
+Good looking
+Innovative cooling design
+Short PCB
+Very quiet

Cons:
-Average overclocking ability
-Poor software included
-Internal exhaust may increase case temperatures