Power Consumption

On top of our graphics performance testing, we have also measured the power consumption of Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GTX 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 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).



While the card isn't the world beater many had hoped for when it comes to performance, what Nvidia has done is reduced the power consumption quite a bit. When you're idling, you'll save around 18W if you've not got a motherboard that supports Hybrid SLI (none are available on the market at the moment), while under load you'll save closer to 30W over the GeForce 8800 GTX.

Power consumption is not surprisingly similar to the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 and in this case our measurements showed the 9800 GTX to be more frugal. Some of that might be down to process maturity, but the rest will more than likely just be variations in silicon - not all silicon consumes the same amount of power with all things equal.