Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we do not use anything too technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.



Overclocked, the EVGA GTX680 consumed the most power out of all of the cards on test save for the previous generation GTX580. At stock speeds , the card was pretty much par for the course, consuming a little over 350W on average (total system power) which to put things into perspective is almost identical to a GTX570 so not a bad job at all considering the extra power phase on the EVGA card.

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 ran Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained.



Being near reference by design, the card was one of the hottest on test which was a shame as I truly feel this may have had some effect on our maximum attainable overclock. The card could really benefit from improved cooling and while EVGA have added a few little tweaks here and there, the reference cooling design is poor in comparison to some of the custom cooled examples we have seen.

Acoustics

Acoustics are very subjective unless you have specialised equipment so you will have to take my word that the card is not noisy and even under load rarely raises above a murmur. Manually setting the fan to maximum obviously raised the decibels but during a four hour gaming session, the card didn't get to this level so it is very unlikely it will become intrusive.

Let's move on to our suite of benchmarks...