GeForce GTX 980 Ti Round-Up With MSI, ASUS, And EVGA

Name: GeForce GTX 980 Ti Round-Up Review: MSI, ASUS, and EVGA
Brand: GeForce

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 09:34 AM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption 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 of 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 the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

power

There's very little to talk about in terms of power and temperatures. All of the cards consumed similar amounts of power at idle. And while under load only 20 watts separates the EVGA card and the ASUS card. GPU temperatures on all three cards peaked at either 74 or 75 degrees as well, when we weren't overclocking.

In terms of its noise output, the cards were all very quiet as well. At idle, their fans don't even spin, so the noise output from the system was generated by the CPU cooler and PSU. Under load, all of the GeForce GTX 980 Ti card remained relatively quiet as well, though the EVGA card's fans produced slightly more noise than MSI's or ASUS'. Our particular ASUS STRIX sample also generated a slight bit of inductor whine under load, but we're told this is not indicative of all STRIX cards.

Tags: Nvidia, Asus, MSI, GeForce, Gaming, graphics, GPU, evga, strix, 980 ti

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