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Le pouvoir "The Power"

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is not bad. Our test system is a Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the nForce 680i SLI mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, DVD-ROM and WD Raptor drive. Have a look

The methodology is simple: we look at the peak wattage during a 3DMark05 session with hefty IQ settings to verify power consumption. It's a good load test as both GPU and CPU are utilized really hard here. Please do understand that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC.

We had a total system wattage peak at roughly 315 Watts for the eVGA 8800 GTS edition card, which is a lot but not excessive. This number will likely be 300 Watts for non-overclocked models. We simply place a wattage meter in-between the PSU and power socket. It's not the most objective way to test as you have to consider PSU efficiency as well... it's the closest thing we can do though, and it measured pretty reliable and constant

Here's the Guru3D.com power supply recommendation for the eVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS KO w/ACS³:

• A single GeForce 8800 GTS requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 26 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.
• A second GeForce 8800 GTS installed on this system requires you to have a 600 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 36 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.

There are many good PSU's out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSU's for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• freezes during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

Les températures de la carte graphique

Right .. we have the ACS³ slapped on top of that graphics card .. let's have a look at the temperatures. We measured at a room temperature of 22 Degrees C.

Despite the faster core frequency on the eVGA ACS³ model temperatures were pretty darn hot. The card is idling at roughly 65 degrees C and at the highest temperature we measured with the GPU under full load was 78 Degrees C. Quite frankly this is slightly worse than the reference cooler and that's puzzling me a little.

Obviously we are dealing with a moderately overclocked product here so that is producing more heat. Usually to maintain a stable overclock a manufacturer can set core voltage of the GPU a little higher in the BIOS, this again will result into high temperatures. So basically the ACS³ cooler is doing it's job adequately, but nothing more than that. The high near 80 degrees C load temperature tells me one thing... we can't overclock much higher ourselves.

If you find this to be high then grab the latest Rivatuner and force the cooling unit to 75% or higher RPM utilization. It's not a lot more noisy yet temps will drop a little.