MSI’s GeForce N470GTX & GTX 470 SLI

GTX 470 SLI: Power, Temperature, & Noise

Wrapping up our look at the GTX 470 SLI, we’ll take a look at power, temperature, and noise. We have already well-established that GF100 cards can be particularly power hungry compared to their Radeon competition at similar performance levels, so this will give us a chance to see just what the situation is like when we throw multi-GPU in to the mix.

Having 2 video cards usually has a negative effect on idle conditions, and the GTX 470 SLI is no different here. Having a second card blocking the first pushes the temperatures of the first card up by 8C.

Load temperatures are similarly affected. The GTX 470 SLI ends up performing just like the GTX 480 SLI here, peaking at 96C under Crysis and stabilizing at 96C under Furmark. NVIDIA strongly suggests separating GTX 400 cards when in SLI for this exact reason – these results are when we already have a fan behind the cards. The Radeon cards do end up in a similar situation, but ultimately they still stay below 90C when in CF mode.

Compared to the GTX 480, the GTX 470 has noticeably lower idle power consumption, which cascades in to our SLI results. The 470 GTX SLI ends up consuming 55W less than the GTX 480 while idling, while consuming around 25W more than the Radeon cards in CF mode.

When the GTX 480 SLI became the most power hungry dual-GPU setup we’ve ever tested, there was little reason to believe that the GTX 470 SLI wouldn’t follow it, so these results shouldn’t be surprising. With Crysis the GTX 470 SLI pulls nearly 100W less than the GTX 480 SLI, but it still pulls between 100W-200W more than the Radeon cards in CF. Furmark is a similar story, but here the difference between the GTX 470 SLI and the Radeon cards is now 150W-250W.

Idle noise is more or less a solved problem. The vast majority of modern coolers emit almost no noise when idling, resulting in SLI having little impact on idle noise.

Our noise charts usually closely follow our power charts, so these results should not be surprising. With the partially obstructed GTX 470 card exceeding 90% of its top fan speed, the SLI combination is second only to the GTX 480 SLI. This is 8dB-11dB louder than the Radeon cards, and makes the GTX 470 SLI the clear winner/loser for the second-worst spot on our load noise charts.

Overall these results closely mimic what we saw with the GTX 480 SLI back when it launched: 1 GF100 card is hot & loud, and 2 cards are even hotter and louder. As the saying goes: cheap, quiet, high-performance – pick any 2.