Power Consumption & Temperatures

Update: Initially we only had time to test the power consumption figures using FurMark which now appears unreliable for measuring power consumption given the changes that Nvidia has made to the GeForce GTX 500 series. When testing the GTX 580 last month we had quite a bit of trouble getting accurate readings using FurMark and therefore started to look at using games to measure power consumption and Crysis Warhead seemed like a good starting point.

The GeForce GTX 570 was 8% more efficient than the GTX 480 and while it consumed a similar amount of power to that of the GTX 470 it was considerably more power hungry than the Radeon HD 5870 using 15% more power.

Although the GeForce GTX 570 uses slightly less power than the GTX 580 they both operate at the same idle and load temperatures when using the Nvidia reference coolers. This is not a bad thing as it means that GeForce GTX 570 is a relatively cool operating high-end graphics card.