Power, Heat & Noise

Here' we'll take a look at a few of the environmental effects the graphics board has on its surroundings and the rest of the system by looking at the Power usage, Heat and Noise outputs. Due to the measuring equipment we'll not be able to give definitive quantities solely pertaining to the graphics board, as we are unable to entirely isolate it, so each of the metrics are taken at a system level, however where the same system is used and only the graphics board swapped out we can begin to gauge the effects the boards have in relation to one another.

For the testing of all the elements we took the idle noise level results shortly after boot-up, by placing the noise level meter at the bottom of the case, the case side was then placed on and the power and temperature readings were taken. 3DMark03's graphics intensive Game Tests were then looped through 4 times, to load up the graphics, and then on the fifth run of Game Test 2 the power and temperature readings were taken again, the case side removed and the noise level measured. 3DMark03 is used as it has a fairly low CPU utilisation, placing much of the emphasis on the graphics capabilities.

The GammaChrome S18 Nitro has the highest system power draw in idle and active conditions, as well as the largest rise between the two usage scenarios. In some respects this is not entirely surprising given it has the highest the core and memory clock speeds of all the boards here, but in others it is as the 6600, for instance, as a total of 8 fragment (shader) pipelines (even though it can only output 4 pixels per clock) - this could be due to process differences as the X600 uses TSMC's 130nm Low-k process, which can reduce overall power consumption, whilst the NVIDIA parts are both on the smaller 110nm process, the S18 on the other hand is likely to be using TSMC's standard 130nm FSG process.

The S18 and 6600 both share a 6 degree rise in system temperature from idle usage to fully active scenarios.

The S18 and 6600 both share similar increases in case noise as well, when going from idle to active.