now while you may see something like this on my test bench and assume that
this is going to be a video about three-way SLI scaling on the GTX 670
that is not actually the topic of this video that will be a separate video
where I'm going to do GTX 670 3-way
versus Radon hd6970 3way because the
performance of these cards is pretty close so I am very interested to see who
scales better at a large at a high resolution like 2560 x600 but no this
video is about temperatures power
consumption and noise yes those three things of the
GTX 670 compared to its immediate competition that is the GTX 680 the 7970
the 7950 the 7870 and the card that it replaces the
GTX 570 so one of the points I just
wanted to make to open this one up that's why I have three cards on the
bench right now is that even with these three
cards we are drawing less than 100 Watts
from the wall at idle this is with an overclocked 4.4 GHz
um 3930 3630
K 3930 sorry guys it's like 4 in the
morning and I'm really tired so it's a 3930k at 4.4 GHz with all the power
saving features turned off 16 gigs of RAM SSD boot Drive big old XL ATX
motherboard three GTX
670s and this is running off of a 1250
wat 80 plus gold power supply so what that means is because this is a 1250 W
power supply is extremely inefficient at only 10% load so in terms of actual
power consumption this system is probably in the neighborhood of about 80
Watts at idle which means these cards are pulling next to nothing at idle this
GTX 670 is very power effici I'm going to show you some graphs and charts as
well as some audio clips comparing its cooler and its uh cooling
characteristics as well as its power draw to its competition now I showed you
guys in the introduction that the system is drawing less than 100 Watts at the
wall so what that means is that when we have a single card drawing 70 Watts from
the wall those two additional cards running in three-way SLI when they're
idling are basically almost completely shut down which is very very cool it
makes for a much more efficient Computing experience because you're not
always going to be loading up all three cards with the latest 3D game sometimes
you have to check your email and it's great if you're not sucking a ton of
power back and paying an immense electricity bill on account of your uh
your massive gaming rig and this is this is totally labeled incorrectly so I
apologize for that this is uh
uh Power in watts and and then less is
better in case you guys didn't know that okay so what else we got here so you can
see that the GTX 670 is very competitive in terms of its performance per watt
because it does outperform the hd7950 and it performs a little bit less
than the 7970 so it falls right into where it's supposed to be um the idle
power is very very very exciting as well and you can see it draws just a little
bit less power than its older brother the GTX 680 which stands to reason when
you compare it to the previous generation product it smokes it not only
in terms of performance but also in terms of both gaming load power as well
as Idle power so how did I measure gaming load power using this guy right
here and then I would stand next to a particular car in Battlefield 3 in the
uh in the underground parade where I was getting very consistent power readings
from all the cards that were pretty near the peak that I was seeing during gaming
just glancing at my power meter the whole time so that's how I'm measuring
the maximum power no it's not 100% scientific but does give you a pretty
good idea of what you're going to be able to expect from any of these given
cards and the way I was measuring idle power was just with my spreadsheet here
open and nothing else happening so all of these new fangled cards are so
efficient at idle um that we only really start to see some separation once they
really get loaded up now let's talk temperatures now these are going to be a
little bit tough to compare because the 7950 data especially is not going to be
very similar to the other data because this is not using a reference cooler
this is using a sapphire dual fan cooler that does a as you can clearly see
significantly better job than the than the reference cooler that's on the 7970
right there even accounting for the fact that the 7950 does not run as hot so
bear that in mind these numbers are not directly comparable between the 670 and
the 7950 so the 670 runs pretty much the
same temps as its older brother I measured these using pretty much the
same method so I'm taking the idle temperature once it's idled at the desktop for you know 5 minutes or
whatever and it's pretty much settled into a very flat line and load temps are
taken when I'm looking at that same car so that's after I've been benchmarking for about 15 minutes already with the
games beforehand and then I get onto Battlefield 3 and I'm seeing at that
point as well a very very flat line so that's when the temperatures have
completely equalized so this gives you some idea what to expect from a
reference card however even at launch for GTX 670 there are non- reference
cards available already and I'm having trouble finding it right now but I have
one lying around here somewhere there you go galaxy has a pretty sweet
non-reference card at launch that has like a glowing GeForce GTX 670 logo
thing going on and dual 92 mm cooling
fans and it looks just like beastly and everything so so bear that in mind guys
this is just based on reference cards based on a non- overclocked card and I
guess that's pretty much all there is to it they run about what you would expect
compared to similar competition like the hd7970 a little bit cooler at idle a
little bit hotter under load now guys you're going to see some
clips of just you know close-ups of the video cards like
this these are once again not scientific these are not meant to evaluate the
exact you know deciel level noise level of these cards they are meant to give
you an idea of the idle and
load um signature of the noise so
whether it's a low growl or whether it's kind of a high pitch squeal um that is
what you guys can evaluate with these clips it should give you some idea of
the of the loudness of the cards but it's not you know it's not scientific so
just bear that in mind
oh