Setup | Power consumption
Hardware installation
Installation of any of the GeForce GTX 460 cards is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we connect the two 6-pin PEG power connectors to the graphics card. Preferably your power supply is compatible, most PSUs after 2008 have these connectors as standard:
- GeForce GTX 460 needs two 6-pin PEG connectors,
- GeForce GTX 460 SLI will need four 6-pin PEG connectors.
Preferably the PEG headers should come directly from the power supply and are not converted from 4-pin Molex peripheral connectors.
You can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest NVIDIA Forceware driver and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.
Power consumption
Lets have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.
The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.
Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based. This setup is overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.
Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is higher than your average system.
Measured power consumption
- Advertised GeForce GTX 460 TDP = 150W (768MB) 160W (1024MB)
- System in IDLE = 167W
- System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 347W
- Difference (GPU load) = 180 W
- Add average IDLE wattage ~ 25W
- Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 205 Watts
Mind you that the System Wattage is measured from the wall socket and is for the entire PC. Below a chart of measured Wattages per card. Overall this us much higher than reference, this is due to an increased GPU voltage to allow easy overclocking and the standard higher clock frequencies.
Power Consumption Cost Analysis
Based on the Wattage we can now check how much a card like today will cost you per year and per month. We charge 0,23 EUR cent (or dollar) per KWh, which is the standard here.
| Graphics card | TDP in KWh | KWh price | 2 hrs day | 4 hrs day |
| Graphics card measured TDP | 0,205 | 0,23 | 0,09 | 0,19 |
| Cost 5 days per week / 4 hrs day | 0,94 | |||
| Cost per Month | 4,09 | |||
| Cost per Year 5 days week / 4 hrs day | 49,04 |
We estimate and calculate here based on four hours GPU intensive gaming per day / 5 days a week with this card.
The 1024MB models have more active ROPs and memory to feed, their power consumption as such is a little higher. Next to that you can clearly see that the faster clocked models have a higher power consumption.
Recommended Power Supply
Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:
GeForce GTX 460
- On your average system the card requires you to have a 550 Watt power supply unit.
GeForce GTX 460 in SLI
- A second card requires you to add another ~200 Watts. You'll need a 750 Watt power supply unit.
If you are going to overclock massively, then we do recommend you purchase something with some more stamina.
There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:
- bad 3D performance
- crashing games
- spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
- freezing during gameplay
- PSU overload can cause it to break down
Let's move to the next page where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.
