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Core Temperature & Acoustics / Power Consumption Core Temperature & AcousticsFor all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z. For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.  We went into this review expecting great things in this crucial area and we weren’t disappointed. Not only did the GTX 460’s thermal characteristics nearly match those of the custom-cooled HD 5830 card but they were achieved with a whisper quiet heatsink fan. Honestly, you’ll probably never hear this card running in your case. This is an impressive result for NVIDIA considering the bad rap some of their higher-end cards currently have in the acoustics and heat department. [h2]System Power Consumption[h2] For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well. Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.  Power consumption is way down when compared to the GTX 465 and the 1GB card even stays below the power consumption of a HD 5830. However, the HD 5850 we have seems to be quite efficient and betters the GTX 460 1GB in terms of overall efficiency. The 768MB card also puts down an impressive showing. If anything, this shows us that the GF104 is definitely on the right track when it comes to competing with ATI’s cards in this area even though hey haven’t quite caught up. | ||||
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