GeForce 8800 Roundup: The Best of the Best
by Josh Venning on November 13, 2006 11:04 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Consumption
Power consumption is something that is important to look at when evaluating a graphics card, and because these 8800s are such high performers, they create very high power levels as well.
We tested power consumption for these parts in the same way we usually do, by measuring the total power draw of the system with each of the cards installed in two different states. The first state is with the system idle (no other programs running) and the second is while the GPU is under stress testing. We use a few of the benchmarks from 3DMark06 to stress the GPUs to find out their power consumption under load. Because we are measuring the wattage of the entire system and not simply the cards, we can only get a general idea of the type of power levels of these cards.
Looking at the data, we immediately see that the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX is the highest on the graphs for its power consumption. This was expected because of its peltier cooler. Most of these cards got results that remained around 180 Watts while the system was idle, and 280 Watts while the system was under load. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS naturally got the lowest levels of the bunch, which makes sense given that it's the lone GTS out of a roundup of primarily GTX cards. Out of the 8800 GTXs though, the ASUS EN8800 GTX seemed to draw the least amount of power under load, and the reference design Sparkle 8800 GTX pulled the least while idle.
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peternelson - Saturday, November 25, 2006 - link
I'm hearing rumours of an even never "dual" type card called 8850gx2.
Anandtech can you reveal any news on this?
at80eighty - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - link
Annual Computernerd Wanfest of 2006 just rolled into town (im a wanking nerd btw :-p)what i saw in the papers was an ad for an XFX 8800 GTX. but this article doesnt mention it's existence (or i missed it)
or did you pick he GTS as it was a better deal than the GTX?
Modular - Saturday, November 18, 2006 - link
I was just wondering why there are no charts showing the core temps when the cards were overclocked. I'd be interested to see how much more heat these things crank out @ faster speeds. I also heard that they no longet throttle the GPU core when in 2D mode. That seems silly to me as it probably is a huge reason for the high idle power draw as well as the high idle core temps...dpante1s - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - link
Would be very interesting to see a roundup just for the 8800 GTS cards as I think that many users may only afford to buy this one but would like to know which one of those is the best for overclocking...crystal clear - Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - link
More GeForce G80 Series RevealedPublished on November 13th, 2006
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Articles&go...">http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Articles&go...
G80-200, G80-400, G80-600,G80-850, G80-875
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
I believe your overclocking results are horribly flawed and misleading. The max core clock varies with each semiconductor part, so you can't just take 8 cards from different companies and determine which company overclocks the best! They all got different G80 dies.Now, cooling could affect the overclock amount. But based on the cooling results, there's no correlation. Look at Sparkle's poor overclock versus its great cooling, as well as EVGA's and MSI's great overclocking versus heat. No correlation.
At least Page 5 said "Whether the overclocks we reached are due to variability in cores or..." But Page 8 showed more misunderstanding with "The temperature levels of this card under load are even lower than the XFX 8800 GTS by over ten degrees. This is somewhat perplexing considering that our Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX sample didn't overclock very well compared to the other 8800 GTXs."
The conclusion should have been "8800GTX's overclock between 627-659MHz", and don't bold the one in the table from the company that happened to get the best die.
shamgar03 - Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - link
I concur, unless the author can present more evidence?cryptonomicon - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
They're valueable to me :(Would love if they every got included on vid card roundups like these...
shank15217 - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
the new nvidia cards are doing great but just take a look at the older 7 series and compare it to the ATI offering. ATI 1950XTX hands the geforce 7 series its butt. I have a strange feeling the R600 will give Nvidia a run for its money.xsilver - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
i found it interesting that on one of your graphs that the overclocked GTS is able to noticibly beat the GTXwould it be possible at a more sane 1600x1200 resolution?