Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 4GB Video Card Review – 2GB or 4GB of VRAM

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers we ran three games at 1920×1080 and averaged the peak results seen on the power meter.

Power Consumption Results: We wanted to know if the Gigabyte GeForce GTX WindForce 3X OC 4GB video card would use more power, so we left both cards at their stock settings and found that it consumed basically the same at idle and just about 10 Watts more when gaming. Not bad for being overclocked with twice as many GDDR5 memory chips!

Sound Testing

We recently upgraded our sound meter to an Extech sound level meter with 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 OC 4GB is significantly quieter than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2GB reference card thanks to the WindForce 3X GPU cooler. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 OC 4GB card never got over 64C whereas the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 reference card would run at 82C when gaming. That makes the Gigabyte card 18C cooler and 8.2dB quieter when gaming! That is a night and day difference. Both cards would idle between 26-27C.