Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power consumption is not really as important on high-end consumer graphics cards as more users are comfortable with using up lots of juice to get their gaming experience where they want it to be.  Still, looking at the relative power consumption of the GPUs presents interesting information on how the parts compare in terms of compute efficiency.

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The overclocked Gigabyte GTX 580 SOC 1.5GB card does use a little bit more power than the reference design, as we would more or less expect with a 10% higher core clock speed.  Both GTX 580s still use much more power than the 28nm-based Radeon HD 7970.

Let’s see how the temperatures on the Gigabyte card compares to the reference design.

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This is always good to see – even with higher clock speeds of the Gigabyte SOC GTX 580, the temperatures are noticeably lower than the reference design.  10 degrees in this scenario is actually quite impressive!

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