VGA Power Consumption

Life is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to current demands, and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow-capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards turning "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that gets sent from various manufacturers every day, and get right to the point: your computer hasn't been doing much to help save energy... at least up until now. Take a look at the idle clock rates that AMD programmed into the BIOS for this GPU; no special power-saving software utilities are required.

The GTX 560 Ti works at 50.6/101/67.5MHz in idle mode, while VDDC lowers to 0.950 volts. At full load it increases frequencies to 900/1050 and VDDC goes up to 1.025 volts. The good part is that the GTX 500 series can be overclocked while keeping idle frequencies, saving some energy and keeping lower temperatures. Just to make sure there's no mistake: non-OC GTX 560 models increase their Load voltage up to 1.00v instead of 1.025v. For reference, my sample successfully worked at 1.00v load voltage while keeping GPU frequencies at 900/1050MHz.

To measure isolated video card power consumption, I used the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:

The ENGTX560 Ti DCII TOP pulled just 19 (91-72) watts at idle and 219 (291-72) watts when running full out, using the test method outlined above. It seems like the ASUS ENGTX560 Ti consumes more power than reference's board, but that's logical as it powers 2x 80mm fans and works at 900MHz with 25 extra milli-Volts to do the job. Consider PSU efficiency into the equations as I'm using an 80 plus bronze power supply. We've become used to the low power ways of the newest processors, and there's no turning back.

I'll offer you some of final thoughts and conclusion on the next pages...

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