Cooling, Noise and Power
On the power side of things, I was surprised that the GTX 760 pulled less than the GTX 670 under load by a noticeable amount because they both had a TDP of 170 watts. This put the GTX 760 under the GTX 770 by 40 watts at load as well, this could be the difference between a power supply upgrade or saving your money and using your current power supply.
The GTX 760 started off with our idle noise testing with one of the lowest results tested, of course all of the results are so close together that it is hard to call this a big win. It wasn’t until you see the 100% fan speed noise results that you can see that the card is fairly quiet, coming in just below the GTX 670 with the same fan shroud design. I did note in my testing though that when the GTX 760 was spooling up to 100% fan speed that it was actually louder putting it at a much higher 76.8 decibels. I’m not sure if it was just a problem with our card, I haven’t heard that noise from any other the other cards tested including the GTX 670 that has the same design.
When it came to our temperature testing, I was surprised that our GTX 760 didn’t hit the same 79 degree sweet spot that other Nvidia cards almost always hit. I was seeing consistent 80 to 81 degree temperatures during all of our Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 testing. This puts the GTX 760 at the top of our charts.