Should I Upgrade My GeForce GTX 460 to a GeForce GTX 960 Video Card?

By Nathan Kirsch

Power Consumption

gtx460 versus gtx960 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 ran Battlefield 4 at 1920×1080 and recorded the average idle reading and the peak gaming reading on the power meter. power Power Consumption Results: We were actually very surprised to see that the GeForce GTX 460 did so well with regards to power consumption. The GTX 460 1GB reference card only used 2-5W more power than the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 DirectCU II OC 2GB video when it came to peak values. NVIDIA hasn’t really dropped the minimum and maximum power draws that much on their ‘sweet spot’ card by that much over five years, but the performance versus Watts has greatly improved.