Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition 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 1.8.2 at 1280×1024 resolution.

The idle power consumption of the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition was a little bit higher than I would care to see. Sitting at 159 Watts at the wall, it was the second highest idle power consumption of all of our cards today and it was only 6 Watts lower than the highest. This is a bit shocking to me considering that the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW was running a Swiftech MCP655B pump and three Yate Loon High Speed 120MM fans in addition to the rest of the hardware. Load power consumption was 57 Watts lower than the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW which sounds about right for the additional water cooling hardware that is required for the EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW.