Power consumption of the 460

That is for the full system. As for the PSU that is their standard set up. They do other reviews that include things like SLIed GTX 480s which actually do need that much power.

If that is for the full system, an i7 CPU, a high end motherboard, a higher end mid range video card and it only pulls 268w, why even make a 1000w PSU?

Becuase 4 GTX 480s take 1600W at full load.

People do need those large PSUs, just not people with a single mid range graphics card.

So the 460 uses only like 50w of power? Because I thought the mobo was using well over 150w, then figure in RAM, the HD's, etc doesn't seem like the video card uses any power.

Well, you need to keep in mind that in Furmark the GPU is stressed but the CPU isn't. When actually gaming both will be stressed and the overall power usage will be significantly higher. You can also overclock cards which can significantly increase power consumption. Then, as I mentioned earlier, you can also run more than one video card at once(SLI/crossfire), up to four cards at a time in fact. Finally there are cards which use much more power like the GTX 480 which I mentioned. When overclocked a single GTX 480 maxes out around 400w on its own.

It is the motherboard, ram and hard drives that hardly use any power. The CPU and video card(s) will be the main power draws in a system. The GTX 460 maxes out at about 150w at stock setting. When fully OCed probably around 200w.

No. In a couple weeks I'm going to prove that 4 GTX 480's, plus an overclocked 980X, pulls around 1000W at full GPU load.

What?! I'm not going against your expertise (I know you know your buisness), but what about this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY8uppkjwL0

The system rarely goes below 1440w.

Tagan...what are those, 70% efficient? 1440x0.7=1008W. Of course he's running the CPU faster than I would, at 4.4 GHz, and overclocking the video cards too, and running more fans, etc etc. all accounting for "at least 8W". I also see that he's only tracking peak power consumption (instantaneous load), not maximum continuous load.

That makes sense, thanks for clearing it up.

Looking forward to that full analysis you're working on in the next few weeks.  

Also according to Tangan that PSU is 80 percent efficient.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Best answer selected by wildkitten.