Power Consumption & Temperatures

The power consumption levels of the GeForce GTX 295 are extreme, though this is to be expected for such a high-end performance part. Under load the GeForce GTX 295 system configuration sucked down 434 watts, which will likely have a negative impact on the power bill. However to put things in perspective, pairing two GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards is not only slower, but also more consuming.

The GeForce GTX 295 managed to use slightly less power than the 4870 X2 under load, but it was a little more hungry at idle. Furthermore, the GeForce GTX 295 used just 7% more power than the GeForce GTX 280 when under load, while it did suck down 34% more power at idle.

Bottom-line when talking about power consumption is that the GeForce GTX 295 requires a truck load, but no more than similar competing products.

Despite the fact that we have a dual-GPU graphics card sucking down this amount of power, the load temperatures of the GeForce GTX 295 are not that bad.

While it is far from cool, the card only reached 75 degrees on the test bed, making it cooler than a GeForce GTX 280. The idle and load temperature results of the GTX 295 were also significantly better than those of the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which reached an incredible 88 degrees when gaming.

As far as noise is concerned, the GeForce GTX 295 made itself heard when under full load. Typically when gaming the fan would spun up as the majority of other cards tested in this review.