Power Consumption

On top of our graphics performance testing, we’ve also measured the power consumption of the tested graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used the same systems that we have used for our 3D performance testing.

For our idle testing, we left the cards idling on the desktop for ten minutes, recording the average draw at the wall socket. For load testing, we used our benchmark routine from Crysis in DirectX 10 mode and measured the peak power consumption throughout the benchmark. We tested the cards in a number of other scenarios and this proved to be the most intensive in all cases, so you can consider this to be a worst-case scenario.

Bear in mind that we have disabled all CPU-related power management options in the motherboard's BIOS so that we can highlight exactly how well the GPU's power management features are working (or not).



Our test system with the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! Edition consumes the same power as it did with BFG Tech's GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore installed at idle, but is 12W more efficient when the system is under load with Crysis running. Some of this can be attributed to the slightly lower core and shader clocks, but more so to the lower memory clock. But in saying that, it's more than likely that some of it may just be down to GPU-to-GPU differences that are a result of the manufacturing process - after all, there are approximately 1.4 billion transistors inside GT200 so you could say it's, errr, pretty complex.