Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power consumption on the 9800 GTX at the idle stage shows just how much NVIDIA and AMD have improved in this area as a savings of more than 40 watts compared GTX 560 Ti is really nice. At the load level, the older card definitely uses a lot less power than anything else we tested and shows how the trend of GPUs has gone for the past several years. Note though that with the increased performance, the newer GPUs are still more power efficient for the performance you ARE getting.

Along with that lower load power consumption comes a lower load temperature level too – kind of makes a gamer wonder why 80+ degree temps became acceptable?