Cooling Noise and Power
Now that we know how good the GTX 980 performs, it’s even more interesting to see how well it performs in the cooling, noise, and power testing. Here we can finally see just how efficient the Maxwell architecture is. I mean we know that the TDP is 85 watts less than the GTX 780 Ti and they both have the same cooler design, but how will that translate into testing. Starting with power testing, I ran the GTX 980 through Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and documented the peak wattage our entire test system pulled as well as a complete idle wattage as well. Under load the GTX 780 pulled 427 and the GTX 780 Ti pulled 491, the 980 pulled an impressive 393, putting it down in the range of the GTX 760 for power usage. For comparison, the GTX 680 pulled 402 under load. At idle the GTX 980 is actually the lowest result on the chart, down along with the Maxwell GTX 750 Ti.
With the exact same cooler that the 700 series cards has I really didn’t have high expectations when testing the GTX 980. At 100% fan speed it still right in with the 780, 770, and 780 Ti with the small differences being small differences in fan production I assume. This was the first time I had done 50% fan speed testing on this design though as we only recently added it. Here we could finally see how well Nvidia’s design does at the fan speeds you will normally see in everyday use. It was well below the aftermarket coolers that were also testing.
Temperature testing can be a little hard to pinpoint actual performance. It used to be a little more cut and dry but these days both AMD and Nvidia actually set target temperatures in their bios and software and the cards run as quiet as they can leading up to that target temperature. So in the case of the GTX 980 for example that target temperature is 79-80 degree’s. This is the exact same target that all of the reference Nvidia cards have been tested at for a while now, so its not really a shock that the GTX 980 results are right next to the GTX 770, GTX 680, GTX 780 and so on. The one exception was the GTX 780 Ti that actually ran a little warmer.
