NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Debuts: ASUS and MSI
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 Asus and MSI GeForce GTX 560 cards consumed just about the same amount of power as the reference GeForce GTX 560 Ti. While idling, the GeForce and mid-range Radeon cards were all within a watt or two of one another, with the sole exception being the Radeon HD 6970 1GB. While under load the MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II consumed slightly less power than the reference GTX 560 Ti and Asus GTX 560 Direct CU consumed slightly more. Power consumption is low enough to be of little concern, however, and the custom coolers on both cards did a great job managing heat. In fact, both cards were extremely quiet; their fans never spun up to levels that were audible over our test system's CPU cooler or PSU fan.
