Page 9 - Power Usage, Overclocking

Our complete test platform with no graphics card uses 129W on idle. With the G80 based NVIDIA 8800GTS 320MB running in 2D mode idle, overall power consumption of the system jumped over 70W to a total power usage of 203W -- while the Asus EN8800GT TOP 512MB used only 174W from 129W (45W difference on idle). The load conditions cannot be measured against no graphics card since the entire system is under load, such as the CPU which will not limit to only graphics card power consumption -- but relatively speaking, the maximum power consumption with the system consisting of the 8800GTS 320MB is a whopping 286W -- while the 8800GT had an approximate 40W difference under load. The die shrunk G92 core certainly added its share of power efficiency -- the NVIDIA 8800GT 512MB factory overclocked card in this review is heck a lot more powerful than the NVIDIA 8800GTS 320MB, and uses a lot less power.

On the overclocking side, Asus already overclocked the card quite a bit to boot off at a core speed of 700MHz -- I've read other reviews and some stock 8800GT can't even reach that speed on user overclocks. Being that, I was able to push it up another 30MHz to 730MHz. As far as memory goes, a bump of 100MHz (50MHz actual clock) can be achieved. This translates to an overclock of 4% and 5%, respectively. This card is already overclocked out of the box, so we did not expect much more -- plus these G92 based cards are clocked pretty high out of the box already.