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

Even though NVIDIA recommends two power connectors, the power draw of the GeForce 8800 GTX is minimal for this class of card. Basically you get almost double the performance at the same power draw compared to the Radeon X1950 XTX.

Since NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX does not use reduced clocks in 2D mode, the power consumption in 2D and idle is a bit higher though.