Power Consumption & Temperatures
There are few surprises when we look at the power consumption levels of the GeForce GTS 450. You could say these are good news as the consumption goes in line with the performance output, resembling what we last saw on the GTX 460 and not the first crop of Fermi-based GPUs.
At idle the GeForce GTS 450 was the most efficient graphics card tested and overclocking it saw no increase here whatsoever. Under load the GTS 450 used 4% less power than the Radeon HD 5770 but 15% more than the 5750. The overclocked Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum consumed 15 more watts under load, a 6% increase which is less than the healthy performance bump we received in return.
Adding a second GeForce GTS 450 graphics card saw the system power consumption level increase by 33% to 324 watts. This meant that the GeForce GTS 450 SLI boards used 13% less power than the Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire configuration and 16% less than a single GeForce GTX 470 graphics card which is impressive.
Despite the heavy overclock we were surprised to find that the Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum operated at roughly the same temperature as the standard GeForce GTS 450.
Although the heatsink/fan of the Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum is quiet and sufficient to allow a core frequency of 930MHz, it doesn't perform as well as other after-market heatsinks we have come across in the past. Still given the generous factory overclock the stress temperature of 71 degrees is acceptable.