Asus DirectCU NVIDIA and AMD Graphics Round-Up
Power Consumption and Temps
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and temps. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while 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 graphics cards alone.
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The power consumption results shown fall in line with expectations. Under load, GTX 580 and 570 cards use the most juice, followed by the HD 6970 and 6950. Of course, the HD 6870 needed the least amount.
With fan control on auto, the results show the four cards sporting the dual fan DirectCU II cooler operate at similar temps in both idle and load states. But surprisingly, the GTX 580 displayed the lowest load temperature. Also, the HD 6870 and its single fan cooler ran warmer than the other models.
