Setup | Power consumption

Hardware installation

Installation of any of the graphics cards is really easy. Once the card is seated into the PC make sure you hook up the monitor and of course any external power connectors like 6 and/or 8-pin PEG power connectors. Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connector native (converting them from a Molex Peripheral connector, anno 2010, we feel is a no-go).

• Download NVIDIA GeForce drivers

Once done we boot into Windows, install the latest drivers and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed unless you like to tweak settings, for which you can open the driver's control panel.

Power Consumption

Let's 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.

Note: As of lately, there has been a lot of discussion using FurMark as stress test to measure power load. Furmark is so malicious on the GPU that it does not represent an objective power draw compared to really hefty gaming. If we take a very-harsh-on-the-GPU gaming title, then measure power consumption and then compare the very same with Furmark, the power consumption can be 50 to 100W higher on a high-end graphics card solely because of FurMark.

After long deliberation we decided to move away from FurMark and are now using a game like application which stresses the GPU 100% yet is much more representable of power consumption and heat levels coming from the GPU. We however are not disclosing what application that is as we do not want AMD/NVIDIA to 'optimize & monitor' our stress test whatsoever, for our objective reasons of course.

Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 system. 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.

We'll be calculating the GPU power consumption here, not the total PC power consumption.

Measured power consumption GTX560

1. Advertised GeForce TDP = 170W
2. System in IDLE = 175W
3. System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 319W
4. Difference (GPU load) = 144 W
5. Add average IDLE wattage ~ 25W
6. Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 169 Watts

Bear in mind 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 is much higher than reference, this is due to an increased GPU voltage to allow easy overclocking and the standard higher clock frequencies.

Based on the Wattage we can now check how much a card like today will cost you per year and per month. We use a charge of 0,23 EUR cent (or dollar) per KWh, which is the standard here.

Measured power consumption R6950 1GB

1. System in IDLE = 178W
2. System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 312W
3. Difference (GPU load) = 134 W
4. Add average IDLE wattage ~ 20W
5. Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 154 Watts

Bear in mind 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 is much higher than reference, this is due to an increased GPU voltage to allow easy overclocking and the standard higher clock frequencies.

Based on the Wattage we can now check how much a card like today will cost you per year and per month. We use a charge of 0,23 EUR cent (or dollar) per KWh, which is the (high) standard here.

We estimate and calculate here based on four hours of GPU intensive gaming per day / 5 days a week with this card.