Cooler, Noise, and Power
With this being the third Nvidia card that I have had on the test bench with this same cooling design I did come into my testing with some expectations. But even so, with the changes in the design from the GTX 780 to the GTX 780 Ti I really wasn’t sure what that would mean for thermal performance as well as real world power usage. So I went through our standard benchmarks to see how the Ti would perform. I started with noise performance. Our testing captures the range of noise that you should expect with both idle and 100% fan speed noise levels. Not surprisingly (because the cooling design really hasn’t changed) both idle and 100% tests came out in line with both the GTX 780 and GTX 770 results. This put the GTX 780 Ti on the higher side of the middle of the pack. This wasn’t a bad result, but to be fair in all of my testing this is the only time the card ever ran at 100% fan load, you will rarely if ever have to worry about it.
For thermal performance while running in the heaven benchmark the highest temperature that I saw the Ti hit was 83 degrees. This is more of a representation of what Nvidia sets their thermal goal at though. As you can see in the second photo, one of the settings you can adjust is your temperature target, setting it at the stock level will get you quiet gaming. You can turn it up to give the card more room to boost or turn it down if you are looking to keep your temperatures cooler.
When it came to power consumption, with this being the new flagship card I wasn’t surprised that it pulls more power than the last two GTX 780’s I have tested, including an overclocked card. At load the entire test bench pulled 491 watts, including its six core CPU, water cooling, and hard drive/SSD. At Idle though the numbers were more impressive coming in within two watts of the GTX 780’s previously tested. You won’t have to worry about your new build sucking down power when you aren’t in game.
