GeForce GTX Titan Thermals & Acoustics Comparison Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,266 words · ~6 min read
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one of the things that's toughest to quantify about the Titan is its
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Acoustics and its temperature sort
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of thing because the way that it works
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you can actually set the temperature of your card you can go okay I want to
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prioritize the temperature of my card I'm going to go prioritize this and you
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set a temperature you can set your temperature at 70° it comes at 80° you
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set it to 90° you can move that slider around and what that'll do is it'll
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actually control itself and stay there
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but then wait there's more you can actually stay there a number of
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different ways you can either stay there by having your fan ramp up and down and
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that's with controllable fan curves or you can stay there by having the GPU
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clock itself down dynamically and reduce its own voltage dynamically in order to
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stay there so the actual temperature fluctuation of a GTX Titan is is
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extremely tight I mean if it doesn't
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have to reach that temperature it won't if it's already got its fan speed on
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minimum it's not going to just ramp up voltage needlessly in order to in order
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to get there but what it will do is it'll stay at or under that temperature
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and it'll do whatever you tell it to do in order to get there so what that means
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is that comparing Titan against the other cards so GTX 680 didn't work this
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way because it used GPU Boost 1 versus GPU boost 2 on Titan and that one was
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controlled by the TD are by the total
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power of the board so it was it was a power limitation as opposed to a thermal
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limitation that caused the GPU to to ramp itself up or ramp itself down so
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okay so that's that's totally different hd7970 Works totally differently again
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where it's actually just got its own kind of profile and it does its own
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thing and there's not a whole lot of uh there's not a whole lot of control it
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just kind of the the the the GPU sort of is fast and then the fan speed ramps up
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as the GPU heats up and it compensates um so so what we had to do was we had to
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kind of decide where we wanted our Titan to be so we aimed for more of a high
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performance Titan however what you could do is set the fan to stay very very much
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in control and have more of a Silent Titan so we had our fan curve that kind
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of went like this and then ramped up quite steeply at the end so it's kind of
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a it's a middle ground but we gave it a good 50 55% fan speed at that 80° Mark
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in order to keep itself cool and make sure that the turbo was going to be able
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to ramp up because once you hit that temperature limit your GPU boost sorry I
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called it turbo but your GPU boost is going to start ramping up so when I
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compare temperatures against the reference 680 and the reference 7970 are
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probably the ones to look at most carefully here uh when I compare
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temperatures against these cards you have to bear in mind I could have just as easily set the Titan to run at a
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completely different temperature so look at it this way all of our cards are
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overclocked 660 Ti SLI 7970 680 Titan
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and there was one other card what was our other card ah yes the Aries too
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they're all overclocked so this is what they sound like and this is the
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temperatures that they run at in order to reach the performance numbers that we
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were able to reach in our other videos
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so let's start with idle temperatures without further Ado uh the 7970 was a
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little warmer than the others and everything else was pretty much the same
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with the GTX 660 Ti is an SLI that's
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probably honestly that's probably an anomaly in the reading because pretty
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much all gpus that have good coolers on them idle pretty close these days
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because of how advanced these video cards are and how they actually don't
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deliver much power to the GPU when it's idling so it can run quite close to
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ambient temperature load temperatures we see a different story Aries 2 steals the
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show no duh it's liquid cooled so there's individual blocks on the two
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gpus that are keeping that very very cool 660 Ti SLI pulls ahead of
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everything else so this is a good opportunity to talk about reference
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boards versus non reference boards uh for example r680 uses a reference cooler
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which has the advantage of exhausting the air out of your chassis through the
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vents in the back but has the disadvantage of not having an open
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design like this MSI 660ti that allows
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it to keep the GPU itself cooler so this
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one kicks heat into your case but keeps your video card cooler overall this one
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gets the heat out of your case but doesn't keep your video card itself as
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cool so you have to make the decision do I care more about the other components
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of my do I have a stuffy cramped case and I got to get that heat out of there
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or do I have a big well ventilated case and I don't care and the other
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components aren't going to get hot anyway so do I go with more of an aftermarket design uh moving right along
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so load temperatures are tighten ran a little bit warmer than our GTX 680 but
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like I said before we could have just as easily uh set it to 78° and would have
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run at 78° but that's how we got the performance we did and it ran a little
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bit less warm than our Radeon
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7970 now temperatures are meaningless without
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Acoustics so what I what we've done is we've set up our our test bench with a
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microphone that is actually 12 in away from where the GPU fans were located
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it's a shotgun mic so it's a directional mic and we have taken sound readings of
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all the cards that we ran at idle and as
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well as some reference noises so I'm going to play back those reference noises I'm going to play back those fan
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speeds and I'm going to calibrate it while I'm editing so that the sound of
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my voice in my ears is about like listening to me talk from you know a few
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feet away and then hopefully all those other sounds will be similar to what
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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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oh
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I think that whispering is sort of random and not always the same but this
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is like kind of if you were 2 to 3 in from someone's ear
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you'd whisper about like this this would be a normal conversational talking voice
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just talking to someone who's about 3 to 4 ft away from you