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

Palit has chosen not to use 2D/3D clock switching (all NVIDIA GT200 based reference designs do). Even then, the power consumption is not terribly high, which is most probably thanks to the 55 nm GPU design and the changes Palit did to the PCB. As a result the card consumes a bit more power in idle (because of the missing 2D low clock state) but slightly less power on average and peak (when considering same clock speeds).