Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels
Hardware installation
Installation of the product is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we connect the two 6-pin a power connectors to the graphics card.
Please do make sure your power supply is compatible:
- GeForce GTX 465 needs two 6-pin PEG connectors
- GeForce GTX 470 needs two 6-pin PEG connectors
- GeForce GTX 480 needs one 6-pin PEG and one 8-pin PEG connector
Preferably the PEG headers come directly from the power supply and are not converted from the Molex peripheral PEG connectors. You can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest NVIDIA Forceware driver and after a reboot, all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.
Power consumption
Lets have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.
The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.
Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based. This setup is overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.
Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is higher than your average system.
eVGA GeForce GTX 465 SC edition
- Advertised GeForce GTX 470 TDP = 215W
- System in IDLE = 192W
- System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 393W
- Difference (GPU load) = 201 W
- Add average IDLE wattage ~ 25W
- Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 226 Watt
Mind you that the System Wattage is measured from the wall socket and is for the entire PC.
Recommended Power Supply
Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:
GeForce GTX 470
- On your average system the card requires you to have a 550 Watt power supply unit.
GeForce GTX 470 in SLI
- A second card requires you to add another ~200 Watts. You need a 700 Watt power supply unit.
For each extra card (3-way SLI) that you add, just add another 200 Watts as a safety margin.
There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:
- bad 3D performance
- crashing games
- spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
- freezing during gameplay
- PSU overload can cause it to break down
The graphics card cooler performance examined
Let's have a look at the temperatures this custom cooler offers.
primary temperatures and clocks during heavy stress
We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming intensely and continuously, we literally stress the GPU 100% here as you can see in the graph.
Graphics card (reference) | Load TEMP C |
GeForce GT 240 512MB | 47 |
Radeon HD 5570 1024MB | 60 |
HIS 5850 iCooler Turbo | 61 |
GBT R5870 SOC | 68 |
Radeon HD 5670 512MB | 70 |
GeForce GTS 250 1GB | 72 |
Radeon HD 5750 1024MB | 73 |
Radeon HD 5870 1024MB | 75 |
Radeon HD 5850 1024MB | 77 |
Radeon HD 5830 1024MB | 78 |
GeForce GTX 465 1024MB | 79 |
GeForce GTX 275 896MB | 82 |
GeForce GTX 470 Palit | 82 |
Radeon HD 5970 2048MB | 83 |
GeForce GTX 285 | 83 |
GeForce GTX 260 SP216 | 84 |
GeForce GTX 480 new BIOS | 88 |
GeForce GTX 470 | 94 |
GeForce GTX 480 reference | 95 |
As you can see, the Palit GeForce GTX 470 remains at acceptable heat levels thanks to the custom cooling design. At 82 degrees C / 180 F we do feel we reach the maximum acceptable temperature.
One word about our test method, temperatures on average in our test will be higher then in your typical game. We fully stress the GPU in a way that is more stringent then your average game. So please understand that what we are showing here are extremes to be found in the upper threshold of temperatures.
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two an imprecise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.
TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS | ||
Jet takeoff (200 feet) | 120 dBA | |
Construction Site | 110 dBA | Intolerable |
Shout (5 feet) | 100 dBA | |
Heavy truck (50 feet) | 90 dBA | Very noisy |
Urban street | 80 dBA | |
Automobile interior | 70 dBA | Noisy |
Normal conversation (3 feet) | 60 dBA | |
Office, classroom | 50 dBA | Moderate |
Living room | 40 dBA | |
Bedroom at night | 30 dBA | Quiet |
Broadcast studio | 20 dBA | |
Rustling leaves | 10 dBA | Barely audible |
For each dBA test we close the PC/chassis and move the dBA gun 75 cm away from the PC. Roughly the same proximity you'll have a PC in a real-world situation.
Noise LeveldBA
Radeon HD 5670 512MB 40Radeon HD 5770 1024MB 41GeForce GTX 275 41Radeon HD 5830 1024MB 42GeForce GTX 465 42GeForce GTS 250 42Radeon 5870 42GeForce GTX 285 43Radeon HD 5970 2048MB 44GeForce GTX 470 Palit 44GeForce GTX 470 46GeForce GTX 480 47The idle noise levels coming from the card are normal, in idle you will hear the card as we measured 40 dBA, which is right below the threshold of noise coming from that PC itself.
Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up, the card does become way more noisy but not irritating. We measured roughly 44 dBA under heavy GPU stress.