NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Versus AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB

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.

Power Consumption Results: The AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB video card does pretty well here in the power test, but it came to a shock to us that it used slightly more than the 2GB version that we tested last month. Every card has different GPU core leakage, so no two GPU’s are exactly identical when picked at random. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti has slightly lower power use at idle, but uses more at full load. It is interesting, though, that as you can see, both of these cards ended up next to each other in the power chart!