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

Just like on the GTX 260 and GTX 280, NVIDIA has implemented 2D/3D clock switching for the GeForce GTX 285. This results in an amazingly low power consumption in idle. Please note that this 2D/3D switching is independent of full screen 3D and will work for windowed applications too.
Even under load the power requirements are modest. Thanks to the 55 nm process the power draw is even lower than the GTX 280. As a result of these optimizations the GTX 285 can easily claim the leading performance per watt score in its class.