NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX Round-Up: BFG, EVGA, Zogis

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 systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.

Our power consumption measurements yielded some interesting results.  In a single-card confugration, the GeForce 9800 GTX consumed less power than the GTS 512MB under both idle and load conditions, which is a surprise considering it essentially a higher clocked version of the card.  In an SLI configuration, power was right on-par with the GTS setup, and in a three-way configuration the new GTXes consumed a bit more power than the Quad-SLI setup.