GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX review (Page 9)

GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX review

Graphics cards 1049 Page 9 of 27 Published 2006-11-07 14:00 by Hilbert Hagedoorn

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Page 8 - Power Consumption & PSU

Power Consumption & PSU

When you are more than doubling up your transistor count you can bet that such a thing will have an adverse effect on power consumption as well. Below we'll show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC.

Quite frankly ... power consumption is not that bad as I expected it to be. We had a total wattage peak at 338 Watts for the 8800 GTS, which is a lot but not excessive .. definitely something you need to keep in mind though.

Allow me to sidetrack for a moment here, this is also why I look at Distributed Computing (GPGPU) a bit with mixed feelings. I mean it's great to help out in a common cause the research cancer, but meanwhile we are fucking up the earth as we have millions of computers pulling over 300 Watts of power constantly, and I'm not even mentioning your power-bill.

Anyway, NVIDIA states that the G80 core can peak at 145.5 Watts with 116.6 on average during gameplay.

Now bare with me here as we built a completely new high-end system for this test. We used a new Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the new nForce 680i mainboard, a Zalman cooler, DVD-rom and WD raptor driver. All that in combo with the GeForce 8800 GTX summed up to a peak load of 363 Watts and the GeForce 8800 GTS at 338 Watts

So here's my power supply recommendation for today.

The GeForce 8800 GTX requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system. You'll also notice that the GTX uses two 6-pin power connectors so I'd like to strongly advise a PSU with dual 12-volts rails here. So why in the name of your preferred God does the GeForce 8800 GTX require two 6-pin power connectors? Well, the PCI Express spec allows for 75W from the edge connector plus 75W from each external 6-pin power connector. The GeForce 8800 GTX requires two 6-pin power connectors to deliver the full power requirements of the board while adhering to the PCI Express edge connector and 6-pin connector specification. So it's more fitting a specification rather then it was "absolutely" needed.

More importantly than just staring yourself blind on Watts .. you need a PSU with a total 30A rating on the 12 Volts rails.

For the 8800 GTS NVIDIA recommends 400 Watts. And I concur. Here the same rule applies yet 26 AMPS on the 12 Volts rails is sufficient. Obviously with high-end systems .. a better PSU, and especially quality PSU, is always recommended.

Something else .. if you opt the guru path of righteousness -> SLI

You hadn't thought of that one had you! You should end up with a 700 Watt or better PSU with a 40 AMPs 12 Volts rail. And yes I agree .. this is getting a little out of hand. As stated, we need to start thinking about mother nature a bit more, this increasing trend in power consumption can't continue.

We have tested SLI for you guys and power consumption rose towards a 512 Watt peak.

There are some good SLI certified PSU's out there, again have a look at our 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?: