 Welcome to the power consumption heat and acoustics oriented segment of my sort of series of video reviews on the GeForce GTX 680. This one's from Galaxy although this is a reference board and I'll get into a little bit more the advantages and disadvantages of a reference board very very shortly. So out of the cards that you guys see here so I've got the GTX 680 I've also got a Radeon HD 7970 which price wise as well as market positioning wise is its closest competitor and what on earth did he just drop? My cat's like dropping things. Alright moving on. Closest competitor in terms of positioning and so we're gonna see how these two stack up head-to-head both of these are reference cards and then there's one card that I haven't tested yet so is not part of my graphs but I want to include it less for the power consumption and the here we go and the idle temperature purposes and more for the load temperature and load noise purpose because I mean the thing about any launch card is it's always a reference card which means it's an Nvidia designed or an AMD designed card using a reference or AMD or Nvidia designed cooler with a reference AMD or Nvidia designed PCB so the advantage is that of that is that it's all validated by AMD or Nvidia so that's good. Usually these reference coolers tend towards the blower types of coolers which exhaust air from the case which some people consider better whereas others prefer the more open style of coolers which deliver significantly better cooling performance for the GPU itself but do not necessarily keep the rest of your system components as cool. Reference boards are pretty standard so you're not going to see a lot of extra features like for example on you know high-end SKUs you sometimes see non-reference PCBs with more power phases things like that better coolers so there's a non-reference card so at launch we are pretty much stuck with reference boards I'm looking forward to seeing GeForce GTX 680s with non-reference designs but for now this is what we got and what the reason I want to compare this non-reference 7970 is because we're starting to see non-reference 7970s now and I want to look at what kind of an advantage it has in terms of especially acoustics as well as low temperatures compared to a reference card so let's do charts and graphs first since that's everybody's favorite part of these videos right so remember not including the sapphire dual X fan 7970 here let's talk system idle temps to start with and my cat really needs to get out of the way go on go away go away please thank you all right here we go system idle temperatures in degrees Celsius so here I've got a wide variety of different cards you can see that out of all of them the 6990 compared to its closest competition in terms of performance which is the 680 and the 7970 as well as the GTX 590 is by far the worst idle temperatures but that's kind of to be expected the 6990 is a bit of a beast when it comes to noise as well as power consumption so I mean honestly so is the 590 not as loud but definitely in terms of power consumption and heat output the so the 680 comes in at 33 degrees honestly all of these are close enough and they're all quiet enough at idle that none of it's really a concern now instead of using furmark for low temperature testing which I have traditionally done in the past I am using games now so I am recording temperatures during games and then I'm tracking whatever was the highest temperature that was reached and I'm going with that in fact you know what oh I guess I actually don't have to I don't have to do the dual X 7970 because we can kind of extrapolate the results from the dual X 7950 that I did use for my testing I sort of forgot about that okay well either way I'll use this one for the acoustic testing since I don't know if I have that 7950 on me right now so reference boards all of these are reference cards the 7970 OC the 680 the 7970 non overclocked 6995 75 85 90 and GTX 680 non overclocked they all hover around that 75 to 80 degrees range although they vary wildly in terms of noise with the 6990 being by far the loudest check out what you get by going with an aftermarket cooler you can drop 20 to 25 degrees off of your load temperatures on your card we're talking real world gaming load by the time you put it in a closed case you're probably going to gain another three to five degrees but we're still talking a very significant improvement in performance of the cooler on your card so that's something to bear in mind so that was with the 7950 OC from sapphire which is using their dual X cooler next we've got system idle power draw so this is where this latest generation of cards just obliterates the previous generation cards check out these numbers 680 and 7970 consume up to a hundred or up to 50 or 60 watts less power than previous generations similarly performing cards like the 6990 and the GTX 590 what that means is basically the equivalent of not having a light bulb on at all times when you have your PC on this is like having like just sort of like a random light bulb on somewhere in your house at all times when your PC is idling in terms of the extra power consumption and then at load the story gets even more dramatic I mean check this out guys so the 6990 and the GTX 590 are just absolute power hogs whereas these latest generation cards consume a trivial amount I mean we're talking about 3% more power than a last generation 580 for the 680 but in spite of that the performance of this card is just worlds better and I oh I just clicked something bad okay it's back is world's better so the 680 in many scenarios is outperforming the GTX here let's take battlefield 3 for an example is outperforming the GTX 580 by a factor of more than double so in terms of the performance per watt it just just yeah it just rocks I mean the 7970 is no slouch either although it does consume more power under load versus the GTX 680 the 7950 consumes significantly less power and hopefully we'll see this something similar from something like a GTX 670 or whatever the derivative is going to be that comes out of it and I'm very very excited about that system idle power draw in what so yeah we went through that so that's pretty much it so now let's just do some acoustic testing I'll give you guys some idle and then gaming load reading so my testing methodology as unscientific as this may be basically involves taking my camera holding it a fixed distance away from the cards and then letting you guys listen to it for a period of about five seconds Honestly, it's too bad that this particular 7970 has a significant amount of coil whine. It's based on a reference PCB, while it does have a reference cooler, so you can't really tell how quiet the cooler is. I did not have the same issue with the 7950 Dual X. That one was very, very quiet because it was using a sapphire designed PCB as opposed to a reference one. Anyway, don't forget to subscribe. Yeah.