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

The power consumption of the Inno3D GTX 275 OC is surprisingly low. Just like the actual rendering performance, power draw is very similar to that of a GTX 285. Our last GTX 275 review was a Zotac GTX 275 Amp! Edition which showed much higher power consumption, a possible explanation is that the Zotac card was running at a much higher GPU voltage than the card from Inno3D.