Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.


In order to characterize a video card's power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The three result values are as following:

• Idle: Windows sitting at the desktop (1024x768 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed.
• Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (two per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
• Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Highest single reading

In the past NVIDIA used a 2D/3D clock system which changed clocks based on GPU load. In their latest driver they are using one set of clocks for both 2D and 3D. This results in a higher idle power consumption as we can see in the idle graph. Under load the power consumption is quite low for the performance delivered. Essentially it is as fast as the 8800 GTX, but with 15% lower power consumption.