Review NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570: All the Features for Less
Power Consumption
We used Unigine Heaven for our power consumption test because FurMark would trigger GTX 500 series’ power monitoring feature, resulting in lower power consumption incomparable to other graphics cards. NVIDIA puts three chips on the PCB of new GTX 500 cards to regulate electricity flowing through the power connectors and PCI Express slot, preventing the power consumption from going beyond rated specification. According to NVIDIA, this new power monitoring feature will only kick in when the graphics card is running heavy-stress softwares such as MSI Kombustor and the FurMark. As in most other applications in general that do not put too much weight on the card, this feature should remain inactive, even if the corresponding card is overclocked.
We recorded a maximum power consumption of 401 watt during full load, a good 44 watt and 36 watt lower compared to the GTX 580 and the GTX 480 respectively. When idle, the GTX 570 consumes about the same amount of power as the GTX 470 at just 198 watt.
Operating Temperature
Using the MSI Afterburner software, we monitored GTX 570’s temperature. Ambient room temps hovered at around 26-27 degree Celsius. Peak temperature when running Unigine Heaven 2.1 was around 75-78 degree Celsius, and 83-85 degree Celsius during FurMark burn test (OCP disabled). Under “auto” mode, the fan generated minimum noise even in full load conditions. Our CPU fan was more audible compared to the blower on the GTX 570. We noted an interesting fact about the fan’s working mechanism. When it was set to 85% and then lowered to “auto” or 45%, the fan did not drop its speed instantaneously. Instead, it reduced the spin rate slowly.
Tags:
More Articles
