NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Review With EVGA And ASUS

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.

Here's where the GeForce GTX 960 gets really interesting. With only a single power connector and TDP of only 120W, it's clear the GTX 960 will be one of the more power-friendly mainstream graphics cards available. But to actually see the cards pulling only slightly more power than a GTX 750 Ti and 100+ fewer watts than a Radeon HD 285 is simply impressive. The GTX 960 may not be a benchmark barn-burner in light of some similarly priced graphics cards, but its efficiency is completely in another league. You could run two of these in SLI and consume similar power to that of a single Radeon HD 285.

With power consumption so low, it should come as no surprise that the GeForce GTX 960 is also very quiet. In fact, both of the cards we tested won't even spin up their fans until the GPU temp breaks 50 - 60'C, so their effectively silent when not under load. And when they are under load, they barely make a peep as well. Typical GPU temperatures, even after hours of benchmarks rarely tickled 70'C.

Simply put: The GeForce GTX 960 is as cool and quiet as high-performance graphics cards come these days.