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.

Marco Chiappetta

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

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