Power Consumption

We are now able to find out what kind of power is being used by our test system and the associated graphics cards installed. Keep in mind; it tests the complete system (minus LCD monitor, which is plugged directly into an AC wall socket).

There are a few important notes to remember though; while our maximum power is taken in 3DMark06 at the same exact point, we have seen in particular tests the power being drawn as much as 10% more. We test at the exact same stage every time; therefore tests should be very consistent and accurate.

The other thing to remember is that our test system is bare minimum - only a 7,200RPM SATA-II single hard drive is used without CD-ROM or many cooling fans.

So while the system might draw 400 watts in our test system, placing it into your own PC with a number of other items, the draw is going to be higher.

For our power usage tests we did a little investigating here. We performed the tests with DES enabled and disabled at stock speeds to see just how much more efficient this setup is. As you can see, the DES system does make quite a bit of difference to a system running at stock speeds. If you were only going to run the system using GIGABYTE's onboard overclocking like C.I.A.2 to overclock the CPU, enabling DES would make a huge difference to not only performance, but energy conservation as well.