Power Consumption
To test for power consumption we do not use anything too technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.
The MSI GTX680 drew a little less power than the other GTX680's on test at stock clockspeeds with a full system draw of 343W. Even with the voltages increased to their maximum anlong with enhanced clockspeeds, the card still behaved by drawing just 20W more.
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 expected, he MSI GTX680 Twin Frozr performed very well indeed, keeping the temperatures very cool indeed. 61c on full load is a fantastic result for MSI and to further concrete their position, the cards temperatures only increased by a further couple of degrees when the voltages and clockspeeds were increased.
Acoustics
The Twin Frozr cooler with it's twin fan 'propeller' design works very well by keeping the heatsink cool and I am happy to report it does this fairly quietly too. With the fans set to auto in Afterburner, the card barely raised a murmur and you would be hard pushed to notice it above medium speed case fans. Setting the card manually above 50% did raise volume levels but rather than the whoosh sound you would expect from two large fans, the sound is more of a whine. That said you will have no cause to increase the fan speed manually thanks to the Twin Frozr cooling design being so efficient at dissipating heat.
Let's move on to our suite of gaming and synthetic benchmarks...
To test for power consumption we do not use anything too technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.
The MSI GTX680 drew a little less power than the other GTX680's on test at stock clockspeeds with a full system draw of 343W. Even with the voltages increased to their maximum anlong with enhanced clockspeeds, the card still behaved by drawing just 20W more.
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 expected, he MSI GTX680 Twin Frozr performed very well indeed, keeping the temperatures very cool indeed. 61c on full load is a fantastic result for MSI and to further concrete their position, the cards temperatures only increased by a further couple of degrees when the voltages and clockspeeds were increased.
Acoustics
The Twin Frozr cooler with it's twin fan 'propeller' design works very well by keeping the heatsink cool and I am happy to report it does this fairly quietly too. With the fans set to auto in Afterburner, the card barely raised a murmur and you would be hard pushed to notice it above medium speed case fans. Setting the card manually above 50% did raise volume levels but rather than the whoosh sound you would expect from two large fans, the sound is more of a whine. That said you will have no cause to increase the fan speed manually thanks to the Twin Frozr cooling design being so efficient at dissipating heat.
Let's move on to our suite of gaming and synthetic benchmarks...
