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.



Both the GTX650Ti BOOST and HD7850 consumed the same amount of power when placed under load which at around 250W should appeal to those who like to keep a check on the electricity bill.

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.



Despite being arguably the most powerful card on test, the MSI GTX650Ti BOOST only hit 61c under extreme load conditions. This is thanks to the fantastic cooling ability of the Twin Frozr III heatsink design. While it is not a new design the old adage 'if it ain't broke - don't fix it' fits perfectly.

Acoustics

The Twin Frozr cooler cools extremely well but as we have found with many high performance coolers, moise is often sacrificed for cooling. This isn't so with the Twin Frozr because it is as quiet as a mouse breaking wind from 200 yards away. Very Impressive. Even under load the noise levels were still drowned out by 'quiet' case fans.