MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning review - Hardware setup | Power consumption

Hardware installation

Installation of any of the GeForce GTX 480 card is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we connect the one 6-pin and two 8-pin PEG power connectors to the graphics card. Preferably your power supply is compatible; most high-end PSUs build after the year 2008 have these connectors as standard:

Preferably the PEG headers should come directly from the power supply and are not converted from 4-pin Molex peripheral connectors. Don't forget to connect your monitor, you can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest NVIDIA Forceware driver and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.

Power consumption

Let's have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.

The methodology: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.

Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based. This setup is overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.

Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is higher than your average system.

Measured power consumption

1. Advertised GeForce GTX 480 Lightning TDP = 275W
2. System in IDLE = 193W
3. System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 471W
4. Difference (GPU load) = 278 W
5. Add average IDLE wattage ~ 25W
6. Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 303 Watts

Mind you that the System Wattage is measured from the wall socket and is for the entire PC. Below a chart of measured Wattages per card. Overall this us much higher than reference, this is due to an increased GPU voltage to allow easy overclocking and the standard higher clock frequencies.

Power Consumption Cost Analysis

Based on the Wattage we can now check how much a card like today will cost you per year and per month. We charge 0,23 EUR cent (or dollar) per KWh, which is the standard here.

We estimate and calculate here based on four hours GPU intensive gaming per day / 5 days a week with this card.

Above a chart of relative power consumption. This is the entire PC with the GPU(s) stressed 100%, and the CPU(s) left in idle. Mind you that these are peak measurements, overall power consumption will be lower.

Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:

GeForce GTX 480

• On your average system the card requires you to have a 650 Watt power supply unit.

GeForce GTX 480 in SLI

• A second card requires you to add another 300 Watts. You need a 1000+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system, especially if you plan on any overclocking).

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
• freezing during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there.