EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS 384 MB Review 98

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS 384 MB Review

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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.

Test System
CPU:Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz
(Conroe, 2x 2048 KB Cache)
Motherboard:Gigabyte P35C-DS3R
Intel P35
Memory:2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4
Harddisk:WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:Windows XP SP2
Drivers:NVIDIA: 169.04
ATI: Catalyst 7.11

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
Compared to ATI's offerings the idle power draw is a bit higher because the card always runs at the highest clock speed. ATI's HD 3xxx Series has a feature called DPM (Dynamic Power Management) which clocks the card down in several steps when it is idle or under very low use. The average and peak power draw numbers are lower, showing the superiority of NVIDIA's GPUs when it comes to power draw in 3D.





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