Gainward Phantom GLH GeForce GTX 960 2GB Review

Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures

Noise

Everyone has their own reasonable noise level when it comes to comes to components in a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down, some want a completely silent computer. Gainward have spent a vast amount of money fine tuning their cooling solutions to provide excellent cooling properties, but also keeping the noise levels down, lets see if it’s paid off shall we?

Here we see the Phantom cooler coming into its own. The less power-hungry GTX 960 even undercuts the GTX 970 which uses exactly the same cooler by around 8-9dBA.

Power Consumption

With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load.

Due to Gainwards cherry picking process for all the components for this graphics card and other GLH series, the results really show. Utilising only the more performance ready and energy efficient components, we see a very low load power consumption, nearly 50% less than its predecessor.

Temperatures

The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds .We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient; in the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created.

The combination of that excellent Phantom cooling solution and much lower power consumption really shows during the load temperature test. We see it being cooler than every other card we tested by 4°c, 17°c cooler than the GTX 970 Phantom; this is simply incredible.