Power consumption and noise
We evaluated the power consumption of the different cards. Measurements were taken at the wall socket. This is therefore the total power consumption of the power supply, in this case a Cooler Master Real Power M1000 (1000 watt).
Use of the 55 nanometer process and PowerPlay in order to reduce consumption means the Radeon HD 3870 as well as the X2 are very economical in stand-by; however, in load PowerPlay no longer gives the Radeons this advantage.
The GeForce GTX 260 and 280 now use similar technology and are now very economical at rest. Of course, the size of the GPU and 65 nanometer process means the Radeons keep an advantage but Nvidia has improved in this area.
In load, a GeForce GTX 260’s consumption is close to that of a GeForce 9800 GTX’s; however, it is more powerful and has the same fabrication process. Not bad. Otherwise, the GeForce GTX 280 gobbles up 50 watts less than a GeForce 9800 GX2 with our system.
Note that the GeForce GTX 200, just like the GeForce 9800 GTX and GX2, are
Hybrid Power compatible. Therefore they can be entirely shut down once used in a system compatible with this technology such as the future nForce 780a for AMD processors. We will have to wait until this summer to see a similar capability for the Core 2.
In terms of sound levels, while the GeForce GTX 260 and 280 are in the silent category, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is still the reference in this domain.
The test
In this test, we used ten games, four of which support DirectX 10. Tests were carried out only in 1920x1200 as a lower resolution isn’t generally suited for such a high end product. Anisotropic filtering, DirectX 10, and HDR were activated in all cases when available in the game. Finally, transparency/adaptive anti-aliasing were activated in multisampling mode.
All available Windows Vista currently available in addition to SP1 were installed.
Configuration
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770
Asus Striker II
4 GB DDR3 1066
Windows Vista SP1
Forceware 177.34
Catalyst 8.5
