one of the things that's toughest to quantify about the Titan is its
Acoustics and its temperature sort
of thing because the way that it works
you can actually set the temperature of your card you can go okay I want to
prioritize the temperature of my card I'm going to go prioritize this and you
set a temperature you can set your temperature at 70° it comes at 80° you
set it to 90° you can move that slider around and what that'll do is it'll
actually control itself and stay there
but then wait there's more you can actually stay there a number of
different ways you can either stay there by having your fan ramp up and down and
that's with controllable fan curves or you can stay there by having the GPU
clock itself down dynamically and reduce its own voltage dynamically in order to
stay there so the actual temperature fluctuation of a GTX Titan is is
extremely tight I mean if it doesn't
have to reach that temperature it won't if it's already got its fan speed on
minimum it's not going to just ramp up voltage needlessly in order to in order
to get there but what it will do is it'll stay at or under that temperature
and it'll do whatever you tell it to do in order to get there so what that means
is that comparing Titan against the other cards so GTX 680 didn't work this
way because it used GPU Boost 1 versus GPU boost 2 on Titan and that one was
controlled by the TD are by the total
power of the board so it was it was a power limitation as opposed to a thermal
limitation that caused the GPU to to ramp itself up or ramp itself down so
okay so that's that's totally different hd7970 Works totally differently again
where it's actually just got its own kind of profile and it does its own
thing and there's not a whole lot of uh there's not a whole lot of control it
just kind of the the the the GPU sort of is fast and then the fan speed ramps up
as the GPU heats up and it compensates um so so what we had to do was we had to
kind of decide where we wanted our Titan to be so we aimed for more of a high
performance Titan however what you could do is set the fan to stay very very much
in control and have more of a Silent Titan so we had our fan curve that kind
of went like this and then ramped up quite steeply at the end so it's kind of
a it's a middle ground but we gave it a good 50 55% fan speed at that 80° Mark
in order to keep itself cool and make sure that the turbo was going to be able
to ramp up because once you hit that temperature limit your GPU boost sorry I
called it turbo but your GPU boost is going to start ramping up so when I
compare temperatures against the reference 680 and the reference 7970 are
probably the ones to look at most carefully here uh when I compare
temperatures against these cards you have to bear in mind I could have just as easily set the Titan to run at a
completely different temperature so look at it this way all of our cards are
overclocked 660 Ti SLI 7970 680 Titan
and there was one other card what was our other card ah yes the Aries too
they're all overclocked so this is what they sound like and this is the
temperatures that they run at in order to reach the performance numbers that we
were able to reach in our other videos
so let's start with idle temperatures without further Ado uh the 7970 was a
little warmer than the others and everything else was pretty much the same
with the GTX 660 Ti is an SLI that's
probably honestly that's probably an anomaly in the reading because pretty
much all gpus that have good coolers on them idle pretty close these days
because of how advanced these video cards are and how they actually don't
deliver much power to the GPU when it's idling so it can run quite close to
ambient temperature load temperatures we see a different story Aries 2 steals the
show no duh it's liquid cooled so there's individual blocks on the two
gpus that are keeping that very very cool 660 Ti SLI pulls ahead of
everything else so this is a good opportunity to talk about reference
boards versus non reference boards uh for example r680 uses a reference cooler
which has the advantage of exhausting the air out of your chassis through the
vents in the back but has the disadvantage of not having an open
design like this MSI 660ti that allows
it to keep the GPU itself cooler so this
one kicks heat into your case but keeps your video card cooler overall this one
gets the heat out of your case but doesn't keep your video card itself as
cool so you have to make the decision do I care more about the other components
of my do I have a stuffy cramped case and I got to get that heat out of there
or do I have a big well ventilated case and I don't care and the other
components aren't going to get hot anyway so do I go with more of an aftermarket design uh moving right along
so load temperatures are tighten ran a little bit warmer than our GTX 680 but
like I said before we could have just as easily uh set it to 78° and would have
run at 78° but that's how we got the performance we did and it ran a little
bit less warm than our Radeon
7970 now temperatures are meaningless without
Acoustics so what I what we've done is we've set up our our test bench with a
microphone that is actually 12 in away from where the GPU fans were located
it's a shotgun mic so it's a directional mic and we have taken sound readings of
all the cards that we ran at idle and as
well as some reference noises so I'm going to play back those reference noises I'm going to play back those fan
speeds and I'm going to calibrate it while I'm editing so that the sound of
my voice in my ears is about like listening to me talk from you know a few
feet away and then hopefully all those other sounds will be similar to what
they would be like if you were listening to them so there you go there's our there's our Acoustics and temperatures
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computer videos
oh
I think that whispering is sort of random and not always the same but this
is like kind of if you were 2 to 3 in from someone's ear
you'd whisper about like this this would be a normal conversational talking voice
just talking to someone who's about 3 to 4 ft away from you