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.
Being one of the high end cards we didn't expect nor receive miracles.It consumed a little more than the reference design but still fell under the power hungry AMD HD7970.
The Inno3D card consumed slightly more power than reference designs, most likely due to the extra fans and factory overclock.
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.
As with all the latest NVIDIA card temperature tests, the graph above can appear a little misleading because the way GP{U BOOST sets the temperature threshold. With our sample set to 80c, the card will keep increasing the 'boost' speed until either temperature or power limits are breached. So, even though our sample reached 80c, it should not be interpreted as being a hot card.
Acoustics
Despite the relatively small 3x fans, the card was surprisingly quiet on all but manual fan controls. During the most strenuous testing, the card barely reached a murmur. Bare in mind though that our test base station is a bench table and not an enclosed environment so to provide the card with clean, cool optimised airflow. A case environment will obviously differ depending on fan speed and airflow and thus the fan speed of the graphics card will adjust itself accordingly.
Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
