NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 Reviews, EVGA and Gigabyte

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 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 drawn by the graphics cards alone.

The GeForce GTX 670 cards we tested proved to be quite power friendly, relatively speaking. The reference GeForce GTX 670 card had the lowest idle and load power of the bunch, followed closely behind by the overclocked variants, which only consumed marginally more power. As we've said in previous articles, NVIDIA's current Kepler-based GPUs are much more efficient than previous-gen products; the GeForce GTX 670 contiues to prove that point.

Due to its relatively low power consumption characteristics, the GeForce GTX 670 cards we tested also ran cool and quiet. We found all three cards we tested to idle in the mid-30'C range (typically around 34'C to 36'C). The reference card with stock cooler would peak in the low 70'C range, but the Gigabyte card would peak at only 63'C - to 64'C under load and its fans would run at only 36%.

The noise output from all of the GeForce GTX 670 cards was also relatively low. While idling the cards were not audible over our PSU fan and CPU cooler. Under load, however, the fans did spin up to the point of being audible, but the cards were never obnoxious or annoying. We'd consider the GeForce GTX 670 a quite card for gamers, but it is not silent under load.