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welcome to the power consumption heat and Acoustics oriented

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segment of my sort of series of video

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reviews on the GeForce GTX 680 uh this

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one's from Galaxy although this is a reference board and I'll get into a

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little bit more the advantages and disadvantages of our reference board

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very very shortly so out of the cards that you guys see here so I've got the

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GTX 680 I've also got a Radeon hd7970

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which price-wise as well as Market positioning wise is its closest

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competitor and what on Earth did he just

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drop my cat is like dropping

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things all right moving on closest

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competitor in terms of positioning and and uh so we're going to see how these

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two stack up head to-head both of these are reference cards and then there's one

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card that I haven't tested yet so is not part of my graphs but I want to include

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it uh less for the power consumption and

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the here we go and the idle temperature

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purposes and more for the load

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temperature and load noise purpose because I mean the thing about any

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launch card is it's always a reference card which means it's an NVIDIA designed

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or an AMD designed card using a reference or AMD or NVIDIA designed

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cooler with a reference AMD or NVIDIA designed PCB so the advantage of that of

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that is that it's all validated by AMD or NVIDIA so that's good usually these

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reference coolers tend towards the blower types of coolers which exhaust

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air from the case which some people consider better whereas others prefer

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the more open style of coolers which deliver significantly better cooling

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performance for the GPU itself but do not necessarily keep the rest of your

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system components as cool

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um reference boards are pretty standard so you're not going to see a lot of

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extra features like for example on um

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you know highend SKS you sometimes see non-reference pcbs with more power

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phases things like that better coolers so there's a non-reference card so at

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launch we are pretty much stuck with reference boards I'm looking forward to

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seeing GeForce GTX 680s with reference

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designs but for now this is what we got and what the reason I want to compare

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this non-reference 7970 is cu we're starting to see non-reference 797s now

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and I want to look at what kind of an advantage it has in terms of especially

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Acoustics as well as load temperatures compared to a reference card so let's do

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charts and graphs first since that's everybody's favorite part of these

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videos right so remember not including the sapphire uh dual x fan 7970 here

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let's talk system idle temp to start with and my cat really needs to get out

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of the way go on go away go away please

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thank you all right here we go system idle

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temperatures in degrees Cel so here I've got a wide variety of different cards

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you can see that out of all of them the 6990 uh compared to its closest

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competition in terms of performance which is the 680 and the 7970 as well as

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the GTX 590 is by far the worst idle

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temperatures but that kind of to be expected the 6990 is a bit of a beast

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when it comes to uh noise as well as power consumption so I mean honestly so

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is the 590 not as loud but definitely in terms of power consumption and heat

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output the uh so the 680 comes in at 33°

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honestly all of these are close enough and they're all quiet enough at idle

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that none of it's really a concern now instead of using furmark for load

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temperature testing which I have traditionally done in the past I am

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using games now so I am recording temperatures during games and then I'm

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tracking whatever was the highest temperature that was reached and I'm

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going with that in fact you know what oh I guess I actually don't have to I don't

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have to do the dual x 7970 because we can kind of extrapolate the results from

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the dual x 7950 that I did use for my

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testing I sort of forgot about that okay well either way I'll use this one for

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the acoustic testing since I don't know if I have that 7950 on me right now so

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reference boards all of these are reference cards the 7970 OC the 680 the

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7970 non overclock 6990 570 580 590 and

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GTX 680 non overclocked they all hover

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around that 75 to 80° range although

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they vary wildly in terms of Noise with the 6990 being by far the loudest check

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out what you get by going with an aftermarket cooler you can drop 20 to

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25° off of your load temperatures on your card we're talking real world

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gaming load by the time you put it in a closed case you're probably going to gain another 3 to 5° but we're still

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talking a very significant Improvement in performance of the cooler on your

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card so that's something to bear in mind

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um so that was with the 7950 OC from Sapphire which is using their dual x

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cooler next we've got system Idol power draw so this is where this latest

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generation of cards just obliterates the

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previous generation cards check out these numbers 680 and

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7970 consume up to a 100 or up to 50 or

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60 watts less power than previous generation similarly performing cards

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like the 6990 and the GTX 590 what that

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means is basically the equivalent of not having a light bulb on at all times when

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you have your PC on this is like having like just sort of like a random light

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bulb on somewhere in your house at all times when your PC is idling in terms of

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the extra power consumption and then at load the story gets even more dramatic I

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mean check this out guys so the 6990 and the GTX X 590 are just

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absolute power Hogs whereas these latest generation cards consume a trivial

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amount I mean we're talking about 3% more power than a last generation 580

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for the 680 but in spite of that the performance of this card is just worlds

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better and I uhoh I just clicked something bad okay it's back uh is

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world's better so the 680 in many scenarios is outperforming the GTX here

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let's take Battlefield 3 for an example is outperforming the GTX 580 a factor of

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more than double so in terms of the performance per watt it just just yeah

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it just rocks I mean the 7970 is no slouch either although it does consume

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more power under load versus the GTX 680

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the 7950 consumes significantly less power and hopefully we'll see this

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something similar from something like a GTX 670 or whatever the derivative is

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going to be that comes out of it and I'm very very excited about

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that system idle power draw in so yeah

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we went through that so that's pretty much it so now let's just do some acoustic testing I'll give you guys some

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idle and then gaming load uh reading so

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my testing methodology as unscientific as this may be basically involves taking

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my camera holding it a fixed distance away from the cards and then letting you

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guys listen to it for a period of about 5

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Seconds

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honestly it's too bad that this particular 7970 has uh a significant

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amount of coil wine it's based on a reference PCB while it does have a

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reference cooler so uh you can't really tell how quiet the cooler is um I did

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not have the same issue with the 7950 dual x uh that one was very very

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quiet cuz it was using a sapphire designed PCB as opposed

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to a reference one anyway don't forget

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to subscribe yay