Final Video on the Power Consumption and Heat Output of 4-Way SLI GTX 480 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
971 words · ~4 min read
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well I'm going to have to actually edit this vid video together a little bit but
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this is going to be my final video about the power consumption of the GTX 480
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four-way SLI you can see my cards are slightly overclocked here but not not by
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a tremendous margin and here I'm going to take a baseline idle temperature
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reading so I'm at 67 65 69 and 63° on
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all four cards and uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to run 3D Mark Vantage
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along with a couple instances of prime 995 in the background and the cat is
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moving the projector don't do that here get it get away from there found a mouse
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well it's not a real Mouse it's like a toy mouse but go play with it over there
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okay so um yeah those are my Baseline temperatures and we're going to have a
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closer look with 3D Mark Vantage running with a couple instances of prime 95 in
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the background I think you will find the results quite
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um interesting the Jane Nash test covers
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between about 900 watts to about 1100 Watts you can see the uh she's getting
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in the boat right now so it's sitting at about 1,000 Watts from the wall and uh
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this one there's kind of a funny thing that I that I want to show you here as
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the plane starts to take off the fans ramp up on the video cards check this
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out I don't know if you'll be able to hear it or
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not happens every time in that particular Benchmark but uh the new
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Calico one is actually the one that I see a little bit more power consumption
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on and uh while I'm waiting for that to load why don't I talk a little bit about
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the heat output this system pretty much instantly heats up
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the room I'm in here so I'm just going to kind of stand in the center and look
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around so you can see about how big this room is and you can pretty much forget
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about gaming with the door closed if you have a system like this as soon as you
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flip the switch on some kind of 3D application it gets hot
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so you can see new Calico is already up around 1200 watts I've seen this one
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Peak as high as about 1300 Watts but
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just on the topic of heat again really quick here I just want to talk a little
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bit about uh what's going on at the back of the system so from here I mean I can
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feel the heat uh being blown out the back of this case it's about like a
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space heater from a distance like this and then even the heat pipes that don't
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have any active air flow pushing the heat away from it I can feel it
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radiating off there at about probably 5 6 in away and even the stickers that are
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on the back of these video cards have been all peeled off just by operating
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for uh for a couple days here on the weekend so let me see what our power
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consumption is like now yeah so we're sitting at about 930 W so basically the
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worst case scenario I've seen is around 1 12200 1225 Watts or rather sorry 1300
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1325 Watts so even like that you're only
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actually pushing about 1100 WT DC you've got about 400 WS to spare on this 1500 w
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Silverstone Strider uh modular power supply and I'm just going to exit The
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Benchmark now so that you can have a look at the actual card temperatures Now
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understand this is a little bit of a warm room but that's the reality of it
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is if you're if you're running these cards and you're not outside it's a warm
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room so you can see that we peaked around 87° on the top one 88 on the next
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one 88 and then 90 so that bottom one which doesn't have the uh the proper
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ventilation slot actually doesn't get that much hotter but um it does get a
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couple degrees hotter than the other cards so thank you for checking out my
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series of videos on the GTX 480 four-way
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SLI I'm going to go ahead and tear this system down now but it was definitely
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fun and uh maybe I'll play with it a
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little bit more before I uh before I completely tear it apart oh yeah one
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other thing I wanted to say right with that 400 WTS of extra capacity this is a
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pretty barebone system I've only got three dims of memory in here I haven't
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got any hard drives I'm just running like one SSD so you throw like you know
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five or six hard drives in there a couple Optical drives some more RAM
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you're still going to be quite comfortable but this system is like I
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wouldn't even use a 1200 W power supply to power this anything less than the
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Silverstone Strider 1500 which is one of the only such power supplies on the
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market is pretty much what I'd recommend and uh that was a big part of the reason
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why I asked Silverstone if we could uh feature them in this video are in this
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series of videos so thank you for checking them out and now I'm actually
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done and yeah obviously in any warm area there's bound to be cats lurking about