Power, temps and noise
Pushing out such performance panache requires more juice than the competition. Evaluated as a system, EVGA's card pulls an extra 50W over the Gigabyte. How is this possible, you may ask? The Classified runs with an under-load voltage of 1.162V compared with 1.1V for the Gigabyte.
EVGA makes a sensible compromise between temperature and noise. There's little point in aiming for a super-low temperature at the expense of a louder card.
The fans spin up from 1,200rpm to around 2,200rpm after 10 minutes of gaming load. You would think that the fan-speed increase would make the card loud, but this is not the case; the design of the blades keeps irritating noise to a minimum.
