Power, Temperature and Noise
There's always a price to pay for improved performance. Higher core frequency and an associated higher voltage curve pushes power consumption up to GTX 780 levels, though still well below that exhibited by the twin Radeon R9 cards.
Gigabyte goes aggressive with the three-fan cooler, disregarding Nvidia's 80°C temperature target. Does it really need to be that low?
Now we come to the card's Achilles heel. All too often Gigabyte sacrifices noise for better temperatures. Logs show the trio of fans spinning at 3,000rpm during gaming, compared with sub-2,000rpm on rival cards.
We'd gladly give up 10°C of cooling performance for a quieter card. Of course, you can set the fans speeds manually through the tweaking software, but we'd encourage Gigabyte to think some more about out-of-the-box acoustics.
