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.



Utilising 3 fans and being overclocked from the factory, we didn't expect the GIGABYTE GTX670 to be a low power consumer and so was the case. It is by no means a power hungry monster that will make the lights flicker when hitting those load conditions but it does consume a fair whack of electricity hitting 348W (total system draw) with only the flagship cards from AMD and NVIDIA drawing more.

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 Windforce cooler has impressed us before on the GTX680 but this time it has left us astounded. Hitting a maximum 56c under load was an amazing achievement and testament to the cooling properties of that massive Windforce design. Even with the voltage whacked up to maximum with overclocks dialled in the card barely broke a sweat hitting a cool 60c.

Obviously, in an enclosed case environment the temperatures above will doubtless increase but even so, this is a magnificent achievement and one which should rightly be applauded.

Acoustics
No only is this card cool but it also goes about it's business in near silence. The GTX670 is near as dammit silent when idle in fact anything below a 40% fan speed you would be hard pushed to hear the card in an enclosed unit. During testing, the card barely raised a murmur and to actually hear the fans we had to manually raise the speed above 50% which will not normally be required during average use. Even loading the card up with Furmark failed to upset the accoustics and thus while we do not have accurate noise measurement equipment, we can only conclude that GIGABYTE's own evaluation of 28.3dB to be true because for the power underneath the bonnet, this is one seriously silent graphics card.

Let's move on to our suite of gaming and synthetic benchmarks...