by Rob Williams on July 1, 2013 in Graphics & Displays
For those interested in NVIDIA’s latest GTX 700 series but are unable or willing to part with $400+, the company’s third and final launch (until the fall, at least) should interest you. It’s the GTX 760, comes in at $249, is built upon the GK104 architecture, and happens to offer some great performance for your hard-earned buck.
To test graphics cards for both their power consumption and temperature at load, we utilize a couple of different tools. On the hardware side, we use a trusty Kill-a-Watt power monitor which our GPU testing machine plugs directly into. For software, we use Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 to stress-test the card, and techPowerUp’s GPU-Z to monitor and record the temperatures.
To test, the general area around the chassis is checked with a temperature gun, with the average temperature recorded (and thus noted in brackets next to the card name in the first graph below). Once that’s established, the PC is turned on and left to site idle for five minutes. At this point, GPU-Z is opened along with 3DMark 11. We then kick-off an Extreme run of 3DMark and immediately begin monitoring the Kill-a-Watt for the peak wattage reached. We only monitor the Kill-a-Watt during the first two tests, as we found that’s where the peak is always attained.
Note: (xx.x°C) refers to ambient temperature in our charts.
Like the other GTX 700 GPUs along with TITAN, the GTX 760 shouldn’t ever go above 80°C thanks to its temperature-based throttling functionality. For some reason, we managed to break through and hit 81°C, but it’s hardly a concern. Power-wise, the load 326W (entire PC) is a bit higher than I would have expected – especially since it’s higher than the slightly faster HD 7970 from AMD.