Power, Temperature and Noise
We're often taken aback by the power consumption chart, but the numbers don't lie - overclocked cards are injected with greater voltage and are consequently less efficient than the reference board. With an overclock applied to core and memory, using Palit's card results in system-wide power draw rising to 266W when gaming, representing a 34 per cent increase over Nvidia's reference design.
Though not the coolest on show, Palit's large, dual-fan cooler has no trouble taming the GTX 980 GPU. 74ºC under load is perfectly acceptable and, more importantly, it allowed the card to boost consistently throughout our benchmarks.
Here's what we like best. Palit could easily have lowered under-load temperature another notch or two by raising fan speed, but the manufacturer instead chooses to keep fan noise as low as possible. When gaming, fan speed stays at around 1,000RPM, which as you might imagine is noticeably quieter than the Galax card, which ramps up to 2,700RPM. No surprise, then, to find that Palit's card is silent when idle - the 31dB represents the background noise of our test platform - and very quiet under load.
