Power Consumption:

On top of our graphics performance testing, we have also measured the power consumption of the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used the same test system as we've used across all of our performance testing.

The system was configured as follows:

• Core 2 Duo E6750 (operating at 2.66GHz -- 8x333MHz)
  
• Gigabyte X38-DS5 motherboard (Intel X38 Express)
  
• 2 x 1GB OCZ FlexXLC PC-9200 memory (operating in dual-channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12 timings)
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA hard drive
  
• PC Power & Cooling 750W Silencer
  
• Windows Vista Ultimate x86

For our idle testing, we left the systems 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 (DirectX 9 mode was used for the Radeon X1950 Pro) and measured the peak power consumption in this section of the title. 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.



Power consumption at idle isn't brilliant, but it's not bad – the reference card is around nine percent more power efficient than the GeForce 8800 GT, while the Zotac uses just five percent less power. Things are much better at load though, where there's a good 15W between the GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 8800 GT cards at stock speeds. Zotac's GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition is just 10W more frugal.

On the whole, the power savings aren't bad, but it's not much more efficient than the GeForce 8800 GT in the performance per watt stakes.