Gadgetory

now while you may see something like this on my test bench and assume that this is going to be a video about 3-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 gonna do GTX 670 3-way vs. radeon HD 6970 3-way because the performance of these cards is pretty close so I am very interested to see who scales better at large at a high resolution like 2560 by 1600 but know 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 this 7970 the 7950 the 7870 and the card that it replaces the GTX 570 so one of the points that 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 gigahertz 39 30 36 30 K 39 30 sorry guys it's like 4:00 in the morning and I'm really tired so that's a 3930k at 4.4 gigahertz with all the power saving features turned off 16 gigs of ram SSD boot drive big ol XL ATX motherboard 3 GTX 670 s and this is running off of a 1250 watt 80 plus gold power supply so what that means is because this is a 1250 watt power supply is extremely inefficient at only 10 percent 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 efficient I'm going to show you some graphs and charts as well as some audio clips comparing it's cooler and it's cooling characteristics as well as its power draw to its competition now I showed you guys in the introduction the system is drawing less than a hundred 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 3-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 games sometimes you have to check your email and it's great if you're not sucking a ton of power back in paying an immense electricity bill on account of your your massive gaming rig and this is this is totally labeled incorrectly so I apologize for that this is power in watts 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 HD 7950 and it performs a little bit less than the 7970 so it falls right into where it's supposed to be 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 in the underground parkade 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 it 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 newfangled cards are so efficient at idle 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 79 50 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 temperatures once it's idled at the desktop for you know five minutes or whatever and it's pretty much settled into a very flat line and low 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 on to 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 if at launch for GTX 670 there are non reference cards available already and I'm having trouble finding it right now but I have them 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 millimeter 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 HD 7970 a little bit cooler at idle a little bit hotter under load now guys you're gonna 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 decibel level noise level of these cards they are meant to give you an idea of the idle and load signature of the noise so whether it's a low growl or whether it's kind of a high-pitched squeal 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