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 suddenly becoming "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that I get 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.

To measure isolated video card power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses 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:

At a mere 30W of power consumption at idle, the factory-overclocked GTX 285 is actually on par with a reference GeForce 8800 GT. Full output power consumption is a different story, however. Under full load, the GeForce GTX 285 draws 249W of electricity. This is very close to what the dual-GPU Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 Atomic ST-6026 consumes, and slightly higher than a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. Nevertheless, only two six-pin PCI-Express power connections are required to fuel the ASUS ENGTX285 TOP.

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