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Power Supply - Watt Did You Say?
The dreaded word in the industry: power consumption.
The GeForce 7600GT requires a stable 12-volt power source for best performance, reliability and most of all that gaming experience of yours.What we always do with new graphics' cards, we measure the wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the entire PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. So please understand that using a Wattage meter is not the most reliable way of measuring power consumption. You basically look at how much power is the power circuit from your house pulling from the PSU. So you need to look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science.
Let's have a look at the three products
| Card | PC Power Consumption in Watt |
| GeForce 7600 GS (Galaxy) | 190 |
| GeForce 7600 GT | 198 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 235 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 255 |
| GeForce 7600 GT (SLI) | 274 |
| GeForce 7900 GT (SLI) | 335 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX (SLI) | 360 |
The methodology: we simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify power consumption. You are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. The 7600 GS graphics card consumes less than 75 Watts at peak during 3D gaming.
I suggest
you need a 350 at the least as you want some spare wattage and as always 420 Watts or better is definitely recommended especially if you keep SLI in mind as a future upgrade. When you buy a new PSU then look at the packaging and check the 12 volts rail on Ampere, it should be 15-17 AMPS.What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:
- bad 3D performance
- crashing games
- spontaneous resetting PC
- freezes during gameplay
- PSU overload can cause it to break down
So many things can happen.
Both the reference 7600 GT and 7600 GS products have a very similar looking single slot cooler. Galaxy however threw that reference cooler away and went for a Zalman cooler. Now these things do not only make the cards much cooler, but they do have one other gigantic advantage .. they are extremely silent. Seriously you will not hear this thing at all.
| Card | Temperature in idle (Celsius) | Temperature at 100% load in (Celsius) |
| GeForce 7600 GS Galaxy | 40 | 53 |
| GeForce 7600 GT | 39 | 65 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 42 | 68 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 44 | 73 |
Let's have a look at the temperatures of a selection of series 7 cards compared with this Zalman cooler.
A maximum 53 Degrees C peak temperature was monitored at the 7600 GS, a really nice score.
