Power Consumption:

On top of our graphics performance testing, we have also measured the power consumption of XFX's GeForce 8800 Ultra 650M Extreme Edition at both idle and load. For this we used our standard test system configuration listed earlier on in the review. In addition, we also tested the power consumption of the Radeon HD 2900 XT on our Asus Striker Extreme so that we could directly compare power consumption across all of the GPUs.

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).



When Nvidia launched the GeForce 8800 Ultra, it talked about there being improvements made to the process that would result in a lower power consumption compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX, despite the higher clock speeds. While we haven't seen this yet, we have seen some differences in power consumption over the three different 8800 Ultras we've tested so far.

In fact, the highest power consumption we've seen was from the reference card supplied by Nvidia and, despite the higher clocks, EVGA's card managed to keep within the same power envelope. XFX's GeForce 8800 Ultra 650M Extreme actually uses even less power than EVGA's card, meaning that this is one of the more efficient chips.

At idle, the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 650M Extreme only uses 3W more than a standard GeForce 8800 GTX - that's pretty impressive considering there are increases of 75MHz, 255MHz, and 460MHz on the core, shader and memory clocks. When it's loaded, it still uses around 25W more power than a reference clocked GeForce 8800 GTX, but that's not so bad considering the performance improvements.