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 on a par with the other GTX770s on test which is very respectable considering the factory overclock and twin cooling design.
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.
The ASUS DirectCU II cooling certainly did its job here, being the coolest GTX770 on test.
Acoustics
While acoustic testing is subjective to one's own hearing, you would have to have the hearing of a bat to complain about the noise the ASUS card makes because it was very quiet throughout our testing even when placed under load. Raising the fan manually to 100% obviously made the card more audible but not so bad that it couldn't be tolerated for short periods of benchmarking.
Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
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 on a par with the other GTX770s on test which is very respectable considering the factory overclock and twin cooling design.
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.
The ASUS DirectCU II cooling certainly did its job here, being the coolest GTX770 on test.
Acoustics
While acoustic testing is subjective to one's own hearing, you would have to have the hearing of a bat to complain about the noise the ASUS card makes because it was very quiet throughout our testing even when placed under load. Raising the fan manually to 100% obviously made the card more audible but not so bad that it couldn't be tolerated for short periods of benchmarking.
Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
