NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Round-Up: MSI, ZOTAC, GB

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, September 13, 2012, 09:00 AM EDT

Page 11:
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 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

Our power consumption numbers mirror many of the benchmark results from the previous pages. As you would expect, the higher clocked GeForce GTX 660 cards consume somewhat more more than the reference card under load conditions. While idle though, the differences are negligeble. Versus competing cards, like we've seen throughout, the GeForce GTX 660 sandwiches the Radeon HD 7870.

With relatively low power consumption characteristics, it should come as no surprise that all of the GeForce GTX 660 cards we tested were quiet and ran relatively cool. All of the cards proved to be quiet, as we never saw their fan speeds spin up past 50%. During moderate loads, these cards do produce a bit of noise, but they'll typically be drowned out by other components. As for their temperatures, the Gigabyte and MSI coolers clearly did the best job keeping temps low, but even the reference cooler is adequate.