NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Round-Up: MSI, ZOTAC, GB

Name: MSI GeForce GTX 660 Power Edition
Brand: MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:00 AM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption, temperatures and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Our power consumption numbers mirror many of the benchmark results from the previous pages. As you would expect, the higher clocked GeForce GTX 660 cards consume somewhat more more than the reference card under load conditions. While idle though, the differences are negligeble. Versus competing cards, like we've seen throughout, the GeForce GTX 660 sandwiches the Radeon HD 7870.

With relatively low power consumption characteristics, it should come as no surprise that all of the GeForce GTX 660 cards we tested were quiet and ran relatively cool. All of the cards proved to be quiet, as we never saw their fan speeds spin up past 50%. During moderate loads, these cards do produce a bit of noise, but they'll typically be drowned out by other components. As for their temperatures, the Gigabyte and MSI coolers clearly did the best job keeping temps low, but even the reference cooler is adequate.

Tags: Nvidia, MSI, GeForce, Gigabyte, Gaming, graphics, Zotac, GPU, dx11, gtx 660, gtx 650

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com