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.



The HIS consumed the most power out of the three cards despite having 1GB less memory than the NVIDIA counterpart. That said, 3W is well within the realm of digital error so it is fair to assume both cards are equal in this department consuming around the 250W.

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 HIS card topped the charts but only just hitting 60c under load conditions. The card was however considerably cooler than the competition when idle.

Acoustics

We have been impressed with the IceQ coolers temperature management in the past but the IceQ coolers were notoriously loud when put under pressure. I am however happy to report the IceQ X cooler is much quieter. While it is still noticeable upon load with the fan set to manual speeds, in auto mode it barely rose above a murmur.