NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Video Card Review w/ MSI and EVGA

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit and did some temperature testing on the EVGA and MSI GeForce GTX 660 video cards.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC Idle:

The EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Superclock had an idle temperature of 35C in a room that was 26.0C (79F).

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC Furmark:

With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 80C and level off there. The single fan was on auto and was spinning at 51% or ~1950RPM during this test. The fan could be heard and boost was not enabled as the card was running at 953MHz due to how strenuous the GPU load and power draw was.

MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr III OC Idle:

The MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr III OC edition had an idle temperature of 32C in a room that was 26.0C (79F). This is 3C better than the EVGA card with the NVIDIA reference cooler design. Also notice that the idle voltage is 0.8620V, which is slightly lower than the 0.8750V seen on the EVGA card.

MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr III OC Furmark:

With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 64C. This is a 16C lower load temperature than the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Superclocked! The dual fans were on auto and spinning at 44% or ~1920RPM during this test. The fans were not that loud and the core clock was running at 1032.8MHz, which is higher than the EVGA cards due to the lower temperatures.

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 38dB. 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 EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC takes advantage of the typical squirrel cage fan design which isn’t known for running silently. While stressing the EVGA GTX 660 SC with Furmark our meter read 47.8dBA which isn’t bad considering that under the same conditions the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC was running at 58.1dBA. The MSI GeForce GTX 660 Twin Frozr III OC edition card runs a vastly different cooling option, and subsequently runs quieter and cooler as we saw above. Twin The MSI GeForce GTX 660 OC was a bit quieter running at only 46.3dBA. The MSI GTX 660 OC was also 1.7dBA quieter at Idle.