Power Consumption

On top of our graphics performance testing, we’ve also measured the power consumption of the tested graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used the same systems that we have used for our 3D performance testing.

For our idle testing, we left the cards idling on the desktop for ten minutes, recording the average draw at the wall socket. For load testing, we used our benchmark routine from Crysis in DirectX 10 mode and measured the peak power consumption throughout the benchmark. We tested the cards in a number of other scenarios and this proved to be the most intensive in all cases, so you can consider this to be a worst-case scenario.

Bear in mind that we have disabled all CPU-related power management options in the motherboard's BIOS so that we can highlight exactly how well the GPU's power management features are working (or not).



When you combine the increased clock speeds with the higher stream processor count on BFG Tech's GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore, you end up with a card that uses more power than a reference GeForce GTX 280 at idle, and one that's 23W thirstier than a standard GTX 260 when its fully loaded. These results don't surprise us in many ways - it's to be expected given what BFG Tech has done with the card.