Power Consumption
You might recall that Nvidia axed support for HybridPower with its GT200-based graphics cards as soon as the new architecture was able to reign in idle power consumption. No longer was it necessary to buy a motherboard with integrated graphics just to keep consumption under control.
Nvidia has made no comment on supporting that quickly-killed feature with the GTS 250. However, last year’s shift to 55 nm manufacturing seemingly made HybridPower irrelevant. As you can see here, all three Nvidia cards use less power at idle than any of the AMD boards we tested.
Under load, consumption jumps by quite a bit. But the two G92-based offerings both dip in under AMD’s Radeon HD 4850—a card that they both also outperform in a majority of tests.
As far as power consumption is concerned, Nvidia has an upper hand.