NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Unleashed

We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.

We had somewhat surprising results with regard to the GeForce GTX 275's power consumption. At idle, it consumed slightly less power than the GTX 285,which is to be expected considering the GTX 275 is clocked a bit lower and is outfitted with fewer memory chips. Under load, however, the GeForce GTX 275 consumed slightly more power than the GTX 285. This is likely due to inevitable variations during the manufacturing of the GPUs, and higher utilization of the GTX 275's 448-bit memory bus.

We'd also like to mention that the GeForce GTX 275 remained nice and quiet throughout testing. While idling, the card wasn't audible over the other components in our test system. Under load, the GTX 275's fan does spin up somewhat, but never would we consider the card loud. Noise is not a concern at all with the GTX 275.