Consumption
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: nvidia, gtx, 280
Consumption
1,400 million transistors engraved at 65 µm... It augurs heavy power consumption for the card. Let’s look at the variations in consumption at the power supply (which includes the consumption of the entire configuration plus 20% in power-supply losses).
The first point is that during gameplay, the power consumption of the new cards is certainly high, but it is not record-breaking. The 280 GTX showed power use similar to that of the 8800 Ultra and less than the 9800 GX2. And if it were higher than the 3870 X2, it’s only because the card is underused in the game we tested with. As an indication, with Fillrate Tester we noted much higher consumption peaks: 404 W for the 3870X2 as against only 340 W for the 280 GTX and 279 W for the 9800 GTX. With the 260 GTX, it only slightly exceeded the 9800 GTX, which is good news. As for the maximum consumption of the cards, Nvidia claims 236 W for the 280 GTX alone and 182 W for the 260 GTX.
On the other hand, Nvidia’s designers have focused on at-idle power consumption. The cards have a chip that monitors the GPU use rate constantly, and using that information the driver automatically adjusts the frequency, the voltage and the activity of each part of the circuitry. And one has to admit that the GT 200s are particularly impressive, completely catching up the historical lag of Nvidia’s chips behind AMD in recent times – and then some: The 260 GTX gets credit for a 20-W drop in consumption measured at the power supply compared to the 9800 GTX, and the 280 GTX also consumes significantly less power – approximately 25 W in 2D (frequencies are dropped to 300 MHz for the GPU and 100 MHz for memory!) and approximately 35 W playing Blu-ray disks. That is really excellent, and more or less cancels the advantage of HybridPower, which requires you to change motherboards to be able to disable the 3D card completely, and lose some gaming performance in the process!
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hmm not as big an improvement as i thought. will have to wait and see on the drivers improving the cards , but the 260 gtx seems to be the much better option given the price. still , will have to see what ati bring to the fray first. patience will be reflected in price i have no doubt.
frankly depressing, Me WANTS MRAW POWER!!!!
I am so disappointed. Now if AMD delivers on the dual GPU single memory rumour (2 GPUs on a single card but without the Crossfire problems) NVidia could have a serious problem.
Why have they tested this system with only 2Gb of RAM? If you're testing a GPU with 1Gb of VRAM, surely you'd have more installed?
They also have 2 conflicting prices on page 28.
For the 280GTX- $846 and $650;
For the 260GTX- $450 and $400
Wouldn't it have been more prudent to test against a 8800gtx ultra as this is still the single most powerfull card.
It might just be me but 66.5dBa is unbearable unless you have your PC locked away in a cupboard somewhere. This business of supplying substandard fans on very expensive cards is intolerable. Why don't they strike a deal with Zalman / Thermalright for example, and ship cards that are quiet / silent? I'm sure that people who have the money to buy a £500 GPU could afford £10 more for a better cooling solution that's included.
where is that 20W to 30W idle you are talking about? The least in the graph is 199W!
mi1ez: Probably the reason for just 2GB RAM was that it allowed Tom's to stick with 32-bit OS architecture. If they tried using more RAM they'd be stuck with 64-bit Bindows which would not be pretty - aside from really needing 8GB to give a big difference over 2GB in 32bit Vista, there's the slight issue of stable signed drivers, which these cards probably won't have for a while. Good luck trying to get Vista 64 to even "see" the cards! XD
jhoravi: that idle power would only come up on newer nVidia mobos as the card would be shut down entirely when idle and hand over to the integrated chip.
And was it me or was the Noise text copypasted over the Temperature text on the next page? Oops.
Lets try again Mr THG (uhhhm try getting your fraking website working plz)...
Now lets see this puppy in action:
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/01G-P3-1289-AR.pdf
!!
Bob