NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Affordable DX11 GPU
Total System Power Consumption
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. 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 total system power consumption of our test rig shows that the new GeForce GTS 450 sips power while idling at the Windows desktop and under load the reference card consumes about the same power as the Radeon HD 5770. The overclocked Asus and EVGA GeForce GTS 450 cards consume a bit more power while idling than the reference card, but while under load they consume about 24-30 more watts. Nevertheless, the GeForce GTS 450's power consumption isn't bad at all. The cards remained quiet throughout testing and were only warm to the touch after hours of benchmarking. We could handle them without a problem immediately after testing. Temps won't be an issue for anyone, provided you've got decent airflow within your system.
