NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2-Way SLI Video Card Review

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it
into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.9.2 at 640×480 resolution. We also ran Battlefield 3, 3DMark11 and Deus EX and averaged the peak results recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter for the gaming results.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 is NVIDIA’s very first 28nm desktop graphics card and it has been designed to be very power efficient. The maximum board power is 195 Watts and the heat output on the GTX680 is 660 BTUs. This is a pretty big deal as this card has a lower power rating than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and AMD Radeon HD 7970 as those cards are both rated at 250 Watts! The good news is that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 has reduced power supply requirements!

Power Consumption Results: Our testing results show that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX680 SLI setup uses just shy of 600 Watts in our test system during Furmark testing and averaged under 550 Watts in the games. We saw power numbers all over the place in the games due to the dynamic clocks of this card. This is one of the reasons we are now averaging a number of tests rather than just one. As for idle power use, the GeForce GTX 680 uses 98 Watts at idle, while the GeForce GTX 680 SLI setup uses 116 Watts.