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Temperature, Noise And Power Benchmarks
Load Temperature
Asus' Strix excels, but EVGA's cooler manages to maintain a temperature under 70 degrees, enabling the lowest idle temperatures as well.
Acoustics
For the acoustics test, we stop all system fans and take a reading from two inches from the card's I/O bracket. This allows us to focus on the GPU cooler's output specifically.
The chart starts at 30 dB, which is what most humans would consider silence. All three cards are completely silent at idle since their fans don’t spin. But the real surprise is our findings during a gaming load. Zotac's card tops out just above 36.5dB. EVGA's SSC never even reaches 36dB, which is the lowest our gear will register. Suffice it to say that this card won't cause any distracting noise in your gaming setup.
Power
EVGA claims a whopping 33% power increase over the reference 120W specification; let's see if that's accurate:
EVGA pulls an impressive 155W under FurMark's "power virus" test, a full 35W above the reference specification. While those measurements won't attract efficiency aficionados, overclockers may rejoice. This is probably one of the highest-powered GeForce GTX 960 cards available, so throttling should be less of an issue than you may experience on other overclocked cards.