Gadgetory

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 gonna go prioritize this and you set a temperature you can set your setup temperature at 70 degrees it comes at 80 degrees you can set it to 90 degrees 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 the GTX Titan 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 ramped 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 one versus GPU boost two on titan and that one was controlled by the TVR 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 a ramp itself down so okay so that's that's totally different HD 7970 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 there's not a whole lot of control it just kind of the the GPU sort of as fast and then the fan speed ramps up as the GPU heats up and it compensates 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 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 percent fan speed at that 80 degree mark in order to keep itself cool and make sure that the turbo was going to be able to ramp up because once you get that temperature limit your GPU boost sorry I called it turbo but your GPU boost is gonna 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 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 660ti SLI 7970 680 tightened and there was one other card our other card is the Aries - 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 the 7970 was a little warmer than the others and everything else was pretty much the same with the gtx 660ti is in sli but probably honestly as 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 low temperatures we see a different story ares two 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 660ti sli pulls ahead of everything else so this is a good opportunity to talk about reference boards versus non reference boards for example our 680 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 all 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 must 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 gonna get hot anyway so do I go with more of an aftermarket design moving right along so low temperatures are tight and ran a little bit warmer than our GTX 680 but like I said before we could have just as easily set it to 78 degrees and it would have run at 78 degrees 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 inches away from where the GPU fans were located so shotgun mic so it's a directional mic and we have taken sound readings of all the cards that we ran at idle and load as well as some reference noises so I'm gonna play back those reference noises I'm gonna play back those fan speeds and I'm gonna 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're listening to them so there you go there's our there's our acoustics and temperatures don't forget to subscribe for this tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos this would be a normal conversational talking voice just talking to someone who is about 3 to 4 feet away from you