PNY GeForce GTX 470 Review

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.

Due to its lower clock speeds, memory interface, and fewer shader cores, the GeForce GTX 470 consumes significantly less power than the high-end GeForce GTX 480. However, with idle power consumption of about 186W and load consumption at 369 watts total for the system, the GTX 470 sucks up almost as much juice as the dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970. There's no question the Radeon HD 5800 series GPU is the more energy efficient of the two.