Power Consumption - Cost Analysis

Power Consumption

During the stress tests we measured power consumption based on the power draw from the entire PC.

The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. After we have run all our tests and benchmarks, we look at the recorded maximum peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. 

Our test system is a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

I'd say 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 a little higher than your average system. But with multi-GPU setups .. well that fact fades away real fast. Check it out.

So yeah with 2-way SLI we noticed our power consumption peaked to roughly 400 Watts, that's not bad really as modern high end-cards consume more all by themselves. Mind you that we stress the GPUs here, not the processor, so you need to add another 100~150W for overall power consumption.

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. Mind you that this is for the reference card x2.