Cooling, Noise, and Power
When comparing cards that have the same chipset like I have with the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X and the Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming, the performance numbers are good, but it’s really in the cooling, noise, and power that we always see the biggest differences. So like always I ran the Gigabyte card through our normal testing. The first of those tests is the power usage test. This was especially interesting to me because the MSI was locked in its OC Mode, but the Gigabyte is clocked a little closer to normal. To get our results I use a Kill-A-Watt on our testbench and document the highest peak wattage draw when in Valley Benchmark on loop. In this case, the G1 Gaming pulled 241 watts. This is exactly the same as the stock clocked RX 480 and well under the MSI GTX 1070 that was pulling 20 watts more. For still being an overclocked card, I think the G1 Gaming did extremely well.
The next test was to bust out our decibel meter and test the noise output of the G1 Gaming at 50% and 100% fan speed. I would include idle as well but like the backlit words on top of the card indicate, the fans turn off at lower usage. So how did the triple fan configuration work out? Well as most of you know, larger fans push more air at a lower rpm, the G1 Gaming, however, uses smaller fans to keep the cards height down. So at 100% fan speed it was louder than the MSI 1070 but not as loud as the reference RX 480 cooler. When I turned the fans down to 50%, a rate that is more likely to come up in normal use, the G1 Gaming was much quieter but still louder than the other cards tested. Sadly, the triple fan setup is going to be noisier than a double fan configuration.
The last batch of testing was to test the cooling performance of the 1070 G1 Gaming. Here I documented the peak temperature when running Valley Benchmark on loop. I did it once with the fan settings untouched then again with the fans running at 100%. This helps us see what to expect for normal temps and then again to see what the cooler is capable of doing if noise isn’t an issue. Like the MSI 1070, the 1070 G1 Gaming ran much cooler than all of the cards with reference coolers on them with the stock fan settings. The MSI did however run two degrees cooler in that situation. With the fans turned up the results were similar again, but this time with the MSI cooler performing even better. Even with three fans it seems the Gigabyte cooler isn’t as efficient as the MSI card. This has to be partially due to the huge size of the MSI card where Gigabyte limited their design to a normal card height.
