Setup | Noise levels

Setting up the PC

At this stage it is time to insert and connect the graphics card to our test system. Mind you that this is a generic description of installation for all cards tested today. Installing the card into your system will be a easy job. Just slide the card into a free PCIe slot, connect the DVI cable to one of the DVI connectors, connect both the 6-pin power connectors to the card.

Especially with a high-end card like this... I do recommend you buy a decent PSU with some reserves, always. The PSU is an extremely important component in your PC. But we'll get into that in a minute.
Once the card is installed, we start up Windows. Install the driver, reboot and you should be good to go. The card should work right after  the reboot, no additional settings need to be changed..

The 6-pin power connectors. The tiny (2-pin) connector is the S/PDIF lead.

Power Consumption

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC.

The methodology is simple: We have a watt monitor constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We look at the recorded maximum WATT 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. From a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is pretty good with the new 55nm products.

Note: we recently upgraded our test-platform, which by itself utilizes a lot of energy.

It's Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.7 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

The ASUS motherboard also allows adding power phases for stability, which we enabled as well. I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to these settings and added CPU overclock. Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is much higher than your average system.

One thing I learned the hard way over the past years is that overclocking always has a direct effect on power consumption. Just have a look at the BFG and Inno3D cards which are pre-overclocked. Immediately you'll notice power draw go up.

Again, our PC is overclocked at standard and is a power sucking demon all by itself.

The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly ~400 Watts, and for a PC with this high-end card, this is a lot but remains within acceptable levels.

The IDLE Wattage is fine, the GTX 275 cards clock down in frequency on all domains when you are not playing games. Mind you that our PC is not setup for power saving features. It's Vista's high performance mode. As such the processor will not clock down in an idle state (and thus consume more power).