NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan: Yes, It CAN Play Crysis 3

Name: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan Benchmarks: Yes, It CAN Play Crysis 3
Brand: NVIDIA's

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, February 21, 2013, 09:00 AM EDT

Power Consumption, Noise, Temps

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 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 just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Despite offering significantly better performance, the GeForce GTX Titan consumed only slightly more power than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition while under load. Versus the other GeForce GTX cards, the Titan's power consumption falls right in line with expectations based on its performance--it uses more power than a GeForce GTX 680, but less than the dual GK104-powered GeForce GTX 690.

We've included this temperature data to essentially show the GeForce GTX Titan's idle temperature because reporting the max temp under load is pointless due to GPU Boost 2.0. Because of Titan's GPU Boost 2.0 features, it will run up to the maximum temperature target while under load and throttle voltages and fan speed accordingly to maintain that target temperature. Because the default temperature target is 80'C, the Titan peaked at 80'C under load. Set the temp target to 75'C and that's how high its GPU temperature will go.

Having a hard temperature target with the GeForce GTX Titan is interesting because it means cards that are better cooled--either through liquid cooling or when installed in a high-performance chassis--should offer somewhat better performance. The cooler a GeForce GTX Titan runs, the longer it will be able to maintain maximum GPU Boost frequencies, which will ultimately improve performance.

In terms of acoustics, the GeForce GTX Titan is simply awesome. It is easily the quietest high-end graphics card we have ever tested. Period. End of story. In real world conditions, the GeForce GTX Titan is somewhat quieter under load than a GTX 680 and is much quieter than a Radeon HD 7970.