G80: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

Power consumption and heat

The GeForce 8800 GTX is obviously a very power-hungry part, as you might have guessed from both the size of the chip, the card and the fact it requires dual power connectors. NVIDIA tells us that the TDP of the card is around the 185W mark. We wanted to see how it measured up against the competition, so we tested the total system power consumption at the wall using a simple power meter.

NVIDIA recommends a 450W true power supply to support the GeForce 8800 GTX, which is obviously a lot less than the 800W it suggested for Quad SLI. Those with cheaper brands of power supply may find that the GeForce 8800 GTX is not particularly stable. If you're unsure whether your power supply is certified to support NVIDIA's new behemoth, you can check over on NVIDIA's website.

To test the cards, we left our systems idling on the desktop, and then fired up Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and proceeded to hack-and-slash for ten minutes so that each of the cards had enough time to get their act together.

As we can see, the GeForce 8800 GTX consumes more power than either the dual-chip GeForce 7950 GX2 or the Radeon X1950 XTX under load. It also gets substantially hotter - not surprising, given the size of the chip.