Page 3 - Power usage, Temperatures & Noise levels

Power consumption

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view the power consumption is not as bad as I expected it to be. The card according to NVIDIA has a TDP of ~105 Watts.

Our test system contains a Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the nForce 680i mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, DVD-rom and WD Raptor drive.

Now as explained, you can opt to go all passive, or you can use the two supplied fans. Let me show you the difference; first passive (no fans). If you do not have enough airflow in your PC and will game passively .. well above you can see the temperature envelope when there hardly is any cooling active in the OC

We see idle temps of 75 Degrees C and when 100% stressed for a while 107 degrees C. That's just horrible. So if you have a lousy ventilated PC ... this is not recommendable.

When you look at the temperatures above again and focus on the second measurement (to the right) you'll spot a 54 degrees C idle temperature and next to it a peak of 87 degrees C. Much better, right? That's a measurement with the fans equipped and activated.

This is a completely different picture isn't it, as long as the heat on those cooling ribbons can be transported with the help of some airflow ... results are not that bad at all. Idling at roughly 55 C and the maximum peak temperature now is ~87 degrees C.

It's still a little high, yet remember this card is pre-overclocked for you. Even our reference card with much lower clocks and the reference cooler was hovering above 90 Degrees C. So really, that's not bad at all.