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 equivalent to its nearest competitors so we have no complaints in this department.

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.



An area where the Windforce once excelled was in the cooling department. Since the advent of Windforce, other manufacturers have been playing catch-up so the gap has lessened somewhat. Only the iChill could beat it (and convincingly!) although we suspect a different stock fan cooling profile was used for each card. The Windforce design can still hold its head quite high though because for what is the fastest overclocked GTX780 on test, it compares very well indeed.

Acoustics

The card was quiet throughout testing, only reaching above murmur level when placed under hours of stress but even then we would argue it would be heard over normal case fans.