Power Consumption and Temperatures
How do both of these new GPUs compare with one another in terms of power consumption and can the GTX 560 Ti really sip power like the GTX 460?

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB and AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 133 

Well, not exactly.  The GTX 560 Ti uses a noticeable amount of additional power to get to that performance level; but the amount of power increase is only about 12%.  That means that if we see an average of 30-35% performance improvement going from the GTX 460 to the GTX 560 Ti that does indicate an improvement in performance / watt (efficiency). 

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB and AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 134 

Right on schedule, adding in the second GTX 560 Ti cost us another 171 watts for a total of 510 watts for the entire system.  And while we were bragging about the performance you could get for $499 with a pair of the new NVIDIA GPUs, it does cost a lot more in the power envelope as the single GTX 580 uses greater than 100 watts less under a full load. 



NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB and AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 135

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB and AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB Review - Graphics Cards 136

Our temperature result for the HD 6950 1GB was incredibly erratic in the GPU-Z application, so we decided to omit it.  The one interesting thing to note is how much hotter the GTX 560 Ti is compared to the GTX 460 under reference designs.  We do have a couple of custom cooler designs here for the GTX 560 Ti that all claim big improvements in this area though, so we eager to see how they perform. 

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