Inno3D iChill GTX 780 HerculeZ X3 Ultra Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅16-09-13
Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption
Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we use the included iPower Meter found with our Thortech PSU. As system load figures obviously differ from idle it is extremely difficult to get an accurate figure of system draw and then simply take this figure away from the overall amount because each game will generate varying levels of CPU and hard drive activity. Dynamic power adjustments which fluctuate in game will also affect accurate power figures thus rendering any such power consumption calculations redundant at worst and approximate at best.

We will therefore take our system readings averaged over a benchmark run of Tessmark (100% load) and after 20 minutes of being idle in Windows 7. These can then be used as a comparison to other graphics cards to determine how much more or less power you can expect a GPU to consume.



Power consumption was near identical with the other custom cooled (also 3 fans) GTX780s on test consuming around the 370W mark (full system) under nominal load conditions.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.



WOW! We had to run this test multiple times with a variety of software solutions to ensure we weren’t getting a misreport of the temperatures because at just 60C under load, it was far and away the best GTX780 cooling solution on test. Admittedly this was with the BOOST function enabled so the fans were running at 100% which perhaps is not reflective of a real world scenario but compared with others on test, the iChill cooling design certainly lives up to its name.

Acoustics

Silent in idle, barely audible under normal gaming conditions is the best way to describe the card. Disabling PWM control and allowing the fans to run full tilt meant the cards volume levels raised considerably but certainly not unbearable, at least for a few of those benchmark runs when you will happily sacrifice silence for cooling performance. We're confident that the iChill cooler is the best GPU cooling solution this side of watercooling - it really is that good.

Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...

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