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 a little higher than it's competitors consuming around 10W more power on average. This does however lead us to question the need for dual 8pin power ports if it only uses a little extra than the cards which utilise an 8+6pin design?
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.
We didn't expect another cooling design to better the GIGABYTE Windforce cooler for some time so you can imagine our surprise when we found the HIS cooler to be ever so slightly more efficient at wicking away the heat from the card. Besting the best is an achievement that deserves much praise. Well done HIS!
Acoustics
The card was very quiet in auto configuration while being a bit 'whiny' in manual (100%) mode. It is certainly not loud by any stretch of the imagination.
