Moving past power consumption we have our look at temperatures, one of the two physical attributes that’s a derivative of power consumption. So in the worst case scenario NVIDA is exceeding our expectations. This reflects the fact that the GTX 680 is the successor to the GTX 560 Ti’s design, which means both cards have similar TDPs, though we would have actually expected the gap between the two to be wider. On that note, it’s interesting to see that while power consumption runs high compared to AMD’s cards, compared to the GTX 560 Ti, power consumption has only ticked up by 4W. NVIDIA’s big GPUs can capture the performance crown, but they come with a high power cost, which makes taking the crown with the much smaller GK104 all the more important for NVIDIA. On the NVIDIA side of things though we can see just how much a smaller die and 28nm improve on matters compared to the GTX 580 – the 118W difference is nothing short of staggering. In spite of this power consumption relative to the 7970 is still lower by 25W, but it blows past the 7950 by 44W. In this case NVIDIA’s lack of a true throttling system continues to be to their disadvantage, as while AMD’s cards can cap their power consumption NVIDIA’s cards must keep going.
Our other power measurement is our pathological case with OCCT. NVIDIA’s power target GPU Boost on Metro 2033 is 170W, the same as the GTX 560 Ti’s TDP, but in all likelihood power consumption has jumped up at least 10W, while power consumption compared to the 7950 is probably a wash. Things are much closer compared to the 7950 however thanks to its similar 200W PowerTune limit, with the GTX 680 drawing only 9W more at the wall.īecause the performance of the video card here impacts the CPU load by requiring more frames to be prepared, power consumption does go up slightly with performance increases, which means some of the power consumption growth we’re seeing here relative to the GTX 560 Ti is a result of that performance gap, but measuring from the wall doesn’t let us fully separate it. The results are roughly where we’d expect them, with the GTX 680 drawing more power than the GTX 560 Ti, but less power than the Radeon HD 7970, and compared to the GTX 580 significantly less power. Shifting into load power consumption, our first measurement is from running our Metro 2033 benchmark. GTX 680 shaves off a watt here versus GTX 560 Ti and 22W versus GTX 580, but without any special technology to further step down, they can’t match AMD and their ZeroCore Power technology. One thing NVIDIA specifically hasn’t touched though is the so-called “long idle” state where the system is powered up but the monitor is blank. We’re saving over 20W at the wall thanks to fewer RAM chips, less power regulation circuitry, and like most other things relating to GTX 680, a general increase in efficiency.
One interesting point though is that because GK104 is a GF114 derivative rather than a GF110 derivative, the GTX 680 does much better here compared to the GTX 580. At 112W at the wall the GTX 680 is actually tied for the lowest power consumption among contemporary cards past and present, but with an estimated 15W idle TDP it’s not significantly different from any of those cards. NVIDIA idle power consumption hasn’t significantly changed relative to GTX 560 Ti – not to say that NVIDIA hasn’t been working on this factor, but the low-hanging fruit has long been plucked. Idle voltages are far most consistent however, with the GTX 680 always dropping to 0.987v at idle. The higher the clockspeed, the higher the operating voltage, starting from a typical voltage of 1.062v at the base clockspeed of 1006MHz, up to 1.175v at the peak clockspeed of our sample of 1110MHz. With new process nodes being the lifeblood of the GPU industry, each new process gives GPU manufacturers a chance to move their product along a continuum do they take advantage of a power consumption reduction for the same performance level, a performance increase for the same power consumption, or something in between? For NVIDIA the answer is a bit of “all of the above”, as while the GK104 based GTX 680 is more a direct successor of the GF114 based GTX 560 Ti in terms of how the GPU was built, NVIDIA has increased their power consumption while at the same time decreasing their die size relative to GF114.Īs we noted in our look at GPU Boost, the operating voltage of the GTX 680 depends on the quality of the GPU and the clockspeed it runs at. As always, we’re wrapping up our look at a new video card’s stock performance with a look at power, temperature, and noise.
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