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).



Although XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition is the fastest card on test here, the company isn't doing any extra-special trickery on the power consumption front - the card tops the charts when it comes to overall system power consumption as well. So it not only performs like a heavily overclocked 9600 GSO, but it also drinks like one as well.