Cooling, Noise, and Power
Honestly, the last batch of my testing was by far the most important. For the most part in the previous benchmarks when comparing between the GTX 1070’s the results are all going to match the clock speeds of each respective card. But these last benchmarks are all focused on cooling hardware and tuning that each individual AIC manufacturer has done to their card. I started my testing with Power usage testing. Here I used a Kill-A-Watt to get a peak wattage pulled by our test bench while looping through the Valley Benchmark. The EVGA and Gigabyte cards pulled literally the exact same wattage, not all that surprising given the matching clock speeds. The MSI, on the other hand, was much higher with its OC Mode activated. The overclocked EVGA is still impressive given it actually pulled 1 watt less than the reference RX 480, especially when you consider the overall performance.
Next, I set up our decibel meter at the edge of our test bench and tested noise at 50% fan speed and 100% fan speed. Idle wasn’t needed because the card turns off its fans when not under load. I test at 100% to see how loud the card can possibly get and then 50% to get an idea of what you would expect to hear in normal usage. Of course, the results will be lower in an actual case as well. Anyhow the EVGA at full speed was quieter than the Gigabytes three fans but louder than the HUGE fans that the MSI card ran. At 50% fan speed, the EVGA was actually the quietest of the three 1070’s. All in all, I wouldn’t call it a loud card but it's not quiet either.
My last tests were focused on the cooling performance of the ACX 3.0 cooler. Here I tested by looping Valley Benchmark and documented the highest temperature reached with the fan settings untouched. Then I let everything cool down and do the test again with the fans turned to 100%. This way we can see how the card will run normally and also what kind of cooling potential the card has if needed. At stock settings the EVGA ran the warmest of all of the GTX 1070’s tested but still well below the 80c range than most reference cards aim to be in. In the 100% fan speed test though the EVGA pulled ahead of the three fans on the Gigabyte card and came close to the bottom with only the MSI and its HUGE cooler outperforming it. It’s clear that EVGA has a soft tune on the cooling focused on keeping the fan speeds down but there is a surprising amount of cooling capacity in that cooler. Given that it’s the smallest of the GTX 1070’s I have tested, that is really impressive.
