ASUS ARES II 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 1.10.4 at 1024×768 resolution in full screen mode. We also ran four game titles at 1920×1080 and averaged the peak results recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter for the gaming results.

Power Consumption Results: At idle the ASUS ARES II uses just 17 Watts or 15% more power than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 reference card. This is pretty good and the cards are on a fairly even playing field at idle. When you put the cards under load you’ll see the power draw at the wall sharply increase! The average Wattage that we saw in games was 452W on the GeForce GTX 690 and 664W on the ASUS ARES II. This means that the ASUS ARES II uses 212W or 47% more power than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690. In Furmark the ASUS ARES II peaked at 782 Watts during the burn-in and was pulling ~6.8 Amps of power draw at the wall. The ASUS ARES II has pretty decent idle power consumption, but it gobbles down the power when under full load with the best of them. This is not the video card to buy if you are worried about purchasing Energy Star rated appliances! This card is for the enthusiast that could care less about power use and want to have the best gaming experience possible.