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2007 Graphics Performance Charts

By Vincent Chang - 6 Sep 2007

Temperature Testing & Power Consumption

Temperature Testing & Power Consumption

The warmest GPUs of the bunch we tested turned out to be the older cards, namely the 2-in-1 GeForce 7950 GX2 and the Radeon X1950 XTX. Both registered temperatures of more than 70 degrees Celsius for their core temperature in our air-conditioned lab. Fortunately the newer GeForce 8800 GTX topped out at around 66 degrees while the faster Ultra did even better by shaving off a couple of degrees. ATI's top Radeon HD card also performed well here with its two-slot cooler and had the edge over both the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS. Overall, most of the graphics cards fell in between the 40 - 60 degrees range and with decent case ventilation, most users should find the default cooling sufficient.

Power Consumption

Next up, we used a power meter at the wall socket to find out the total power draw of our system, which is quite average in terms of peripherals installed like hard drive, optical drive and nothing else fancy. Hence all the numbers shown in our graph, whether at idle or full load, is the total sum of all the devices in the system, of which the graphics card is only a part of. For our load test, we ran F.E.A.R without anti-aliasing at 1600 x 1200 and maximum settings.

As you can see, NVIDIA's high-end GeForce 8800 cards recorded the highest total power draw at full load and at idle, so for the energy conscious bunch, the GeForce 8800 cards may not be the ideal match. ATI's Radeon HD 2900 XT comes close at full load, though still around 50W less than the GeForce 8800 Ultra. At idle, it had commendably low power consumption at only 103W, placing it lower than the GeForce 8600 GTS for one. The high numbers for full load are the reason why power supplies are coming in ever more powerful wattages, not to mention that a multi-GPU SLI or CrossFire configuration will surely inflate these numbers.

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