welcome to the power consumption heat and Acoustics oriented
segment of my sort of series of video
reviews on the GeForce GTX 680 uh this
one's from Galaxy although this is a reference board and I'll get into a
little bit more the advantages and disadvantages of our reference board
very very shortly so out of the cards that you guys see here so I've got the
GTX 680 I've also got a Radeon hd7970
which price-wise as well as Market positioning wise is its closest
competitor and what on Earth did he just
drop my cat is like dropping
things all right moving on closest
competitor in terms of positioning and and uh so we're going to see how these
two stack up head to-head both of these are reference cards and then there's one
card that I haven't tested yet so is not part of my graphs but I want to include
it uh less for the power consumption and
the here we go and the idle temperature
purposes and more for the load
temperature and load noise purpose because I mean the thing about any
launch card is it's always a reference card which means it's an NVIDIA designed
or an AMD designed card using a reference or AMD or NVIDIA designed
cooler with a reference AMD or NVIDIA designed PCB so the advantage of that of
that is that it's all validated by AMD or NVIDIA so that's good usually these
reference coolers tend towards the blower types of coolers which exhaust
air from the case which some people consider better whereas others prefer
the more open style of coolers which deliver significantly better cooling
performance for the GPU itself but do not necessarily keep the rest of your
system components as cool
um reference boards are pretty standard so you're not going to see a lot of
extra features like for example on um
you know highend SKS you sometimes see non-reference pcbs with more power
phases things like that better coolers so there's a non-reference card so at
launch we are pretty much stuck with reference boards I'm looking forward to
seeing GeForce GTX 680s with reference
designs but for now this is what we got and what the reason I want to compare
this non-reference 7970 is cu we're starting to see non-reference 797s now
and I want to look at what kind of an advantage it has in terms of especially
Acoustics as well as load temperatures compared to a reference card so let's do
charts and graphs first since that's everybody's favorite part of these
videos right so remember not including the sapphire uh dual x fan 7970 here
let's talk system idle temp to start with and my cat really needs to get out
of the way go on go away go away please
thank you all right here we go system idle
temperatures in degrees Cel so here I've got a wide variety of different cards
you can see that out of all of them the 6990 uh compared to its closest
competition in terms of performance which is the 680 and the 7970 as well as
the GTX 590 is by far the worst idle
temperatures but that kind of to be expected the 6990 is a bit of a beast
when it comes to uh noise as well as power consumption so I mean honestly so
is the 590 not as loud but definitely in terms of power consumption and heat
output the uh so the 680 comes in at 33°
honestly all of these are close enough and they're all quiet enough at idle
that none of it's really a concern now instead of using furmark for load
temperature testing which I have traditionally done in the past I am
using games now so I am recording temperatures during games and then I'm
tracking whatever was the highest temperature that was reached and I'm
going with that in fact you know what oh I guess I actually don't have to I don't
have to do the dual x 7970 because we can kind of extrapolate the results from
the dual x 7950 that I did use for my
testing I sort of forgot about that okay well either way I'll use this one for
the acoustic testing since I don't know if I have that 7950 on me right now so
reference boards all of these are reference cards the 7970 OC the 680 the
7970 non overclock 6990 570 580 590 and
GTX 680 non overclocked they all hover
around that 75 to 80° range although
they vary wildly in terms of Noise with the 6990 being by far the loudest check
out what you get by going with an aftermarket cooler you can drop 20 to
25° off of your load temperatures on your card we're talking real world
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
talking a very significant Improvement in performance of the cooler on your
card so that's something to bear in mind
um so that was with the 7950 OC from Sapphire which is using their dual x
cooler next we've got system Idol power draw so this is where this latest
generation of cards just obliterates the
previous generation cards check out these numbers 680 and
7970 consume up to a 100 or up to 50 or
60 watts less power than previous generation similarly performing cards
like the 6990 and the GTX 590 what that
means is basically the equivalent of not having a light bulb on at all times when
you have your PC on this is like having like just sort of like a random light
bulb on somewhere in your house at all times when your PC is idling in terms of
the extra power consumption and then at load the story gets even more dramatic I
mean check this out guys so the 6990 and the GTX X 590 are just
absolute power Hogs whereas these latest generation cards consume a trivial
amount I mean we're talking about 3% more power than a last generation 580
for the 680 but in spite of that the performance of this card is just worlds
better and I uhoh I just clicked something bad okay it's back uh is
world's better so the 680 in many scenarios is outperforming the GTX here
let's take Battlefield 3 for an example is outperforming the GTX 580 a factor of
more than double so in terms of the performance per watt it just just yeah
it just rocks I mean the 7970 is no slouch either although it does consume
more power under load versus the GTX 680
the 7950 consumes significantly less power and hopefully we'll see this
something similar from something like a GTX 670 or whatever the derivative is
going to be that comes out of it and I'm very very excited about
that system idle power draw in so yeah
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
idle and then gaming load uh reading so
my testing methodology as unscientific as this may be basically involves taking
my camera holding it a fixed distance away from the cards and then letting you
guys listen to it for a period of about 5
Seconds
honestly it's too bad that this particular 7970 has uh a significant
amount of coil wine it's based on a reference PCB while it does have a
reference cooler so uh you can't really tell how quiet the cooler is um I did
not have the same issue with the 7950 dual x uh that one was very very
quiet cuz it was using a sapphire designed PCB as opposed
to a reference one anyway don't forget
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