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Thermal Imaging / Acoustics / Power Consumption Thermal Imaging   Honestly, what’s there really to say about this? It looks like the water cooler is accomplishing exactly what it sets out to do: whisk all of the heat away to points outside the case so the confines around the card remain cool. Acoustical TestingWhat you see below are the baseline idle dB(A) results attained for a relatively quiet open-case system (specs are in the Methodology section) sans GPU along with the attained results for each individual card in idle and load scenarios. The meter we use has been calibrated and is placed at seated ear-level exactly 12” away from the GPU’s fan. For the load scenarios, Hitman Absolution is used in order to generate a constant load on the GPU(s) over the course of 15 minutes.  Since the fans don’t have to spin up to compensate for increase thermal loads, the Hybrid becomes one of the quietest cards around. However, we would like to see lower idle levels but the fan runs at a continual speed unless you utilize motherboard-bound software or BIOS settings to modify its RPM curve. System Power ConsumptionFor 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 used 15 minutes of Unigine Valley running on a loop while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 15 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption.  These are somewhat different results than we are used to seeing since lower temperatures typically lead to more efficiently running cores. However, in this case the large fan and water pump add a bit of power overhead. | ||||
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