NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Launch Review - PAGE 14

To measure the GPU temperatures, we ran two game benchmarks and recorded the idle and load temperature according to the minimum and maximum temperatures posted by MSI Afterburner. The software we tested were Crysis 2 and Unigine Heaven 3.0, running both benchmarks for 15 minutes each. This way we can give the included thermal solution and GPU time to reach equilibrium.

To measure power usage, a Kill A Watt power meter was used. Note that the numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the idle readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running. For load testing, we took the sustained peak power drain readings after running the system through the same in-game benchmarks we used for the temperature testing. This way we are recording real world power usage as opposed to pushing a product to its thermal threshold.