NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS Refresh: Asus and XFX
Power Consumption and Noise
Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter and also took some notes regarding its noise output. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used and to explain how loud the configurations were under load. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the video cards alone.
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Considering its performance throughout testing, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card's power consumption fell right in line with expectations. While idle and under load, its power consumption fell right in between the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 8800 GTX. In comparison to the relatively new Radeon 3800 series cards, the 65nm 8800 GTS 512MB's power consumption is considerably higher, but then again so is its performance most of the time.
In regard to the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card's acoustic profile, we can say that these new cards are very quiet during normal operation. Like most modern video cards, the cooler's fan speed is dynamically controller and at the highest speed it generates a fair amount of noise. Howefer, during testing, even while overclocked, the fan never kicked up to its highest speed.
