NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Round-Up: EVGA, ZOTAC, GB

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

With its diminutive size and relatively low TDP, it should come as no surprise that the new GeForce GTX 650 Ti is the most power friendly card of the bunch. The Radeon HD 7770 consumed similar amounts of power under both idle and load conditions, but the better overall performance of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti easily make it the more power efficient solution.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti's relatively low power consumption also results in very manageable GPU temperatures. The Reference card and ZOTAC and EVGA cards all operated at similar temps when idling and while under load. The Gigabyte card, however, offered the lowest load temperatures by far. That folks, is what happens when you put a cooler that's twice the size of your competition and two fans on a mainstream GPU.  All of the fans on these cards proved to be quiet as well. Under load, the highest fan speed we saw was 29% of maximum. Actually, the highest we saw reported by GPU-Z was 49% max fan speed on the Gigabyte card, but we think the utility was being thrown off by the two fans, which are connected to a single fan connector.