Cooling, Noise, and Power

I was actually expecting this card to pull at least a watt over what the reference design pulled under load simply for powering the extra cooling of the card. Surprisingly though our numbers were spot on both times. If I hadn't done the testing myself both times I would think that someone was just being lazy and faking the numbers considering the flat 200 and 400 watt results. As with the reference design, I love that this pulls a little less than the lower TDP GTX 680 even.

It’s interesting to be able to see how the GTX ACX stands next to the reference design for noise output. I wasn’t surprised that the two fans made a little more noise at idle, just like we saw with our R7970 from XFX but even at 100% the difference wasn’t as big as I expected. Under normal use the EVGA card was noticeably louder as well, but that is more related to EVGA’s fan profiles, as you will see in the next result they are a little different than the reference design.  

I was extremely impressed when I did the load temperature testing on the GTX 770 ACX. The card came in 20 degrees less than what the reference design did. This can be attributed to the more efficient cooling design some but I also noticed that the fan profile for this card is a little more aggressive than the reference design meaning the fans will spool up earlier and faster. Considering the results I don’t think we can complain.