Cooling Noise and Power
For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage.
For this, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and AIDA64. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The Prime RTX 5070 Ti averaged 340 watts across our tests and peaked at 359 making for a very small gap between all of the results. Both results were below the RTX 4080 SUPER but the peak was especially impressive being close to the same as the RTX 3070 Ti.
With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The Prime RTX 5070 Ti did well for power efficiency with only the other 50 Series GPUs being higher.
My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The Prime RTX 5070 Ti was at the bottom of our chart with its 50% fan speed result and did well at 100% fan speed as well. This was especially impressive when compared to the fan speed chart. Normally cards will perform close to how high the fan RPM is but the Prime RTX 5070 Ti was a lot lower even with it being a three fan card.
I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Here the Prime RTX 5070 Ti was a little farther up in the charts when compared to the overall noise tests from before. But it was still well into the bottom half of the chart. The fan speed under load chart shows that the Prime RTX 5070 Ti was running at 59% of its fan speed when under load which is higher than average, Asus’s card design did a good job of keeping things quiet with that in mind.
To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the Prime RTX 5070 Ti came in at 64c putting it right in the middle of the chart. Its memory temperatures leveled off at 60c which would put it in the middle of the pack as well. Cranking the fan speed up to 100% did also give better cooling performance with the card running at 54c in the same test at 100% fan speed making a 10c delta between the results which would be around average. The memory temperatures dropped down 10c as well from 60c down to 50c.
While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. On the fan side of the Prime RTX 5070 Ti, we see a 10c range from the left and right side of the card with the right side notably cooler with its blow-through design. The hottest spot is the 35.6c behind the far left fan which isn’t too bad. Up on the top edge of the Prime RTX 5070 Ti things are warmer with the hottest area being 53.3c and again the cooler over on the far right is a lot cooler at 35.8c. Then around on the back the exposed back of the GPU is the hottest spot on the GPU. The aluminum backplate has a consistent 45c and then the back of the blow-through cooler is running at 38.1c.
