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 TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC averaged 348 watts which was 8 watts more than the 5070 Ti Prime showing that Asus did increase the power for the overclock. Its peak wattage was 362 watts which is 3 watts more than the Prime putting it behind the RX 6750 XT.
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 TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC came in at 38.19 with its overclock not changing the 3DMark numbers much but the wattage going up putting it a hair below the Prime here.
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 TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC came in near the bottom of our chart at 50% fan speed but did move up slightly at 100% fan speed but was still in the bottom half of the chart. The fan speed and 100% charts match up perfectly which just tells us its noise performance is in line with where it should be.
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 TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC landed down in the bottom 1/3 of the chart .7dB below the Prime. This is surprising when you see the fan speed percentage when under load which has the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC up in the top half of the chart at 52% fan speed.
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 TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC was running cool at 60c, 4c lower than the Prime. The memory temps were also solid at 48c with the stock fan profile 2c lower than the Prime. Cranking the fan speed up to 100% the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC runs at 53c making the delta between the stock profile and 100% being 7c which is a little low. Given that we saw the stock fan profile has the cards at 52% when under load this just tells us that Asus has the fan profile set aggressively on this profile. Given how the noise results came out, I would say that it didn’t turn out bad. A lot of times a fan profile like that will give good cooling performance but make the card noisy.
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. The fan side of the TUF Gaming RTX 5070 Ti OC shows that the left side of the card does run a little warmer but not nearly as much as most cards. The hot spot here is 31c and the blow-through area is in line with the center of the card, Asus did a great job of balancing the cooling out across the card. Up on the top edge where we can see the PCB we do see that the PCB is 5c warmer from one end to the other and we can see it pushing air up through the top and the blow-through section is much cooler. On the back, the metal backplate has thermal pads pulling heat from the back of the PCB so it is acting as a heatsink as well and you can see that with it running 42-45c. The exposed PCB behind the GPU is the hotspot of course but at 54c is cooler than you would normally see.
