Power Consumption Over Three Generations
An Overview Spanning Three Generations
We’re now comparing the results for idle, gaming, and torture (full) loads for the current, as well as two previous, graphics card generations by Nvidia and AMD. Due to the sheer amount of data, we’re just comparing the GeForce GTX 960 models in this review, as well as the emulated Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Reference model (see also previous page), to the charts entries of the previous models’ reference cards.
Overall, Nvidia’s Boost 2.0 gets our seal of approval. All GeForce GTX 960 graphics cards that we tested did an excellent job based on their clock speed settings. The worst case power consumption scenario is set with the power target and can certainly be reached with either so-called power viruses or heavily parallelized computations, though.
At idle, the models sporting a 5+1 phase design consume an average of 3 to 10 W more than their simpler counterparts, but are also free of audible capacitor noise or “whining.” The additional effort on the part of the manufacturers is being rewarded when it comes to this, at least, and we won’t spoil the next pages by talking about any other benefits at this point.
