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 custom cooled GTX780 on test which in turn consumes a little more power than the reference design, most likely due to the additional overclock and fans.
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 GPU BOOST 2.0 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
As with the GTX770 Windforce, the 780 version was extremely quiet even under the highest load. While all sound is subjective to how sensitive your hearing may be, we would wage you would struggle to hear this GPU over average case fans.
Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
