Temperature And Noise Benchmarks
Temperature Curves for All Cards Running a GPGPU Application
We benchmarked temperatures and fan speeds after running a general-purpose compute applications for five minutes. Despite their common GPU, the curves for each card are very different, from Asus' cool GTX 660Ti DirectCU II to Zotac's GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition that really has to spin its fans up to maintain reasonable thermals.
Asus' GTX 660Ti DirectCU II looks like it has a very well-constructed cooler, though it does leave us with some questions. The card doesn’t have a back plate to help dissipate heat, which is probably alright. But the temperature on the back of the board, below the VRM, reaches almost 80 degrees Celsius. Even the RAM modules exceed 70 degrees after 15 minutes of full load in a chassis. It’s nice that the card is by far the quietest in our round-up, but some of its components can use more airflow.
Zotac's GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition is the loudest card in today's story, but is still probably the best board in spite of its modest GPU Boost capabilities, particularly when you take its small size into account. Overclocked memory is really what puts it over the top. Competing cards all perform fairly similarly, so it's hard to nail down winners and losers, though.
Noise
Let’s have a look at the acoustic results in dB(A) before we get to the noise comparison videos on the next page. As usual, the benchmark numbers themselves and the subjective noise impression can be two completely different things.
