NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 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.

Manufacturing the GT200 GPU on a 55nm process seems to have done a lot of good in terms of power consumption.  While idling at the Windows desktop, the card consumes only a few more watts than the single GPU GeForce GTX 280.  Keep in mind, the GTX 295 has nearly double the number of memory chips on board along with the second GPU.  And under load, the GeForce GTX 295 consumes about 40 fewer watts than the Radeon HD 4870 X2, despite outperforming it in the vast majority of our benchmarks.

We should also note, that altough the GTX 295 can consume a good amount of power, the card's cooler is relatively quiet.  You can hear the fan spinning up in some situations, but by no means would be consider it loud.