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.
NVIDIA recommend a PSU capable of 500W for their reference design models and Inno3D follow suite for the iChill GTX760. We however believe you could possibly get by with a smaller PSU given that both our GTX760 samples pulled much less than this. It is however worth bearing in mind that you will need twin 6-pin PCIe power cables which are unlikely to come with a low specification unit.
The Inno3D card consumed slightly more power than reference designs, most likely due to the extra fans and factory overclock.
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.
IF the iChill card was going to excel in any benchmark, this was it. We are happy to report that it did not disappoint being by far the coolest card on test at both idle and load speeds. Even when overclocked, the card barely broke the 60c barrier which is a fantastic achievement given that reference GTX760s will readily hit 80c with ease.
By under no illusion, the Inno3D iChill HerculeZ is one cool customer indeed!
Acoustics
Despite having excellent cooling, the graphics card cooling design does not sacrifice acoustic ability with it being silent for the most part. The card does begin to hum a little when under load for extended periods but for the most part you would struggle to hear it over average case fans.
Let's see how the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
