ASUS GeForce GTX 680 & GTX 670 DirectCU II Top Edition Video Card Reviews

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 1.10.1 at 1024×768 resolution. 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: When it comes to power use, we measured the entire system at the wall and discovered that the power draw greatly varied at load depending on what video card was in the system. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X used the most power in both load scenarios and the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X used the least. The two ASUS GeForce 600 series DirectCU II Top edition cards ended up in the middle with some pretty respectable power numbers considering that these are high-end graphics cards that are all factory overclocked with dual-fan cooling solutions.