NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT Launch and 3-Way Shootout
Power Consumption
Power consumption is an interesting
variable which many people are curious about. Since NVIDIA’s new G94 is
largely based on its G92 (GeForce 8800 GTGTS 65nm) predecessor, which was fairly modest in terms
of power consumption, many are hoping that this new generation of
mid-range components will perform even better in this regard. In order
to prove this out, we used a hardware AC wattage monitor and tested our boards sitting at the windows desktop, along with running a GPU intensive
application for a prolonged amount of time. This scenario also let us
test minimum and maximum GPU thermal levels.
While the G94 has less stream processors compared to the G92 featured in the GeForce 8800 GT, we don’t see a huge decrease in power consumption. Under heavy load, we see about a 10 Watt difference between a stock clocked 8800 GT and a stock clocked GeForce 9600 GT and our overclocked GeForce 9600 GT cards close that gap a little. In general, power consumption for these new GeForce 9600 GT cards is very tolerable, although we didn’t see any large gains in efficiency like we would have hoped for. All of our GeForce 9600 GT cards consumed slightly more power compared to the AMD Radeon HD3870/3850 cards we tested.
