Power Consumption:

On top of our graphics performance testing, we have also measured the power consumption of Inno3D's GeForce 8600 GTS iChiLL Xstriker3 graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used our standard test system configuration listed earlier on in the review.

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 The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 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 (or not).



Inno3D's GeForce 8600 GTS iChiLL appears to draw slightly less power from the socket than both BFGTech's GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 and a reference design 8600 GTS too. There's a certain amount of variability in how much power two identical pieces of silicon use, even if they're literally adjacent to one another on a wafer - you could use the range from the three GeForce 8600 GTSes as a fairly typical range of power consumption.