NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Round-Up Review

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.

The new GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards are relatively power friendly in comparison to the other high-end graphics cards we tested. Despite having different GPU and memory clocks, coolers, and PCBs, the four GTX 660 Ti cards we tested all consumed about the same amount of power, give or take a few watts. Idle power consumption was similar across the board, but generally speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards (and the stock 7950) were the least power hungry under load.

Due to their relatively low power consumption (in comparison to the higher-end cards), the GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards we tested didn't pump out exorbitant amounts of heat. However, we still spent some time monitoring temperatures and comparing the performance of the various coolers used on the cards. As you can see in the chart above, the Gigabyte offering ran the coolest, under both idle and load conditions, followed by the MSI card. ZOTAC's AMP! Edition came next and EVGA's card, with its reference NVIDIA cooler, trailed.

In terms of their noise output, we'd consider all four of the cards we tested to be relatively quiet. At idle, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards could not be heard over our test system's PSU fan and CPU cooler. Under load, the fans on each card do spin up and generate and audible whir, but they were by no means loud.

Although the numbers aren't comparable due to the differences in the fans and coolers used on all of the cards, we checked to see how fast the fans would ultimately spin with the GPUs under load. The EVGA and Gigabyte cards' fans peaked at the 52% mark, ZOTAC's hit 59%, and MSI's only 41%. It appears MSI was very conservative with the fan speed profile on their card.