Power Consumption, Temperature, Noise, Overclocking

Our earlier measurements of the power consumption of the GeForce GTX 465 were questioned by incredulous readers because the GeForce GTX 465 proved to consume over 25 watts more than the GeForce GTX 475. So, we are going to retest them and also check out the nonstandard power circuit of the Palit GeForce GTX 470 using the same testbed and methods.

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU (3GHz, 1333 MHz FSB x 9, LGA775)
• DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset)
• PC2-1066 SDRAM (2x2 GB, 1066MHz)
• Enermax Liberty ELT620AWT PSU (620W)
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 7 64-bit
• CyberLink PowerDVD 9 Ultra/"Serenity" BD (1080p VC-1, 20 Mbit)
• Crysis Warhead
• OCCT Perestroika 3.1.0

The new testbed for measuring electric characteristics of graphics cards uses a card designed by one of our engineers, Oleg Artamonov, and described in his article called PC Power Consumption: How Many Watts Do We Need?. This device facilitates and automates the measurement process. As usual, we used the following benchmarks to load the graphics accelerators:

• CyberLink PowerDVD 9: FullScreen, hardware acceleration enabled
• Crysis Warhead: 1600x1200, FSAA 4x, DirectX 10/Enthusiast, "frost" map
• OCCT Perestroika GPU: 1600x1200, FullScreen, Shader Complexity 8

Except for the maximum load simulation with OCCT, we measured power consumption in each mode for 60 seconds. We limit the run time of OCCT: GPU to 10 seconds to avoid overloading the graphics card's power circuitry. Here is what we managed to obtain using this testing methodology:

The card behaves almost alike to the reference one and lowers its power consumption when playing high-definition video. There is some difference in numbers, though:

The power circuit of the Palit card seems to be somewhat less efficient than that of the reference card and it consumes more in 3D applications, but not more than the GeForce GTX 465. However, the Palit has a lower peak of power consumption when playing video. There are no differences in terms of load distribution among the individual power lines in 3D mode. In Desktop mode the Palit distributes the load more evenly between the external power connectors compared with the reference card from Nvidia.

The rechecked results of the reference card are almost the same as before. We ran the cycle of tests three times and every time the peak power consumption in gaming mode was 200 to 203 watts. In other words, the GeForce GTX 465 can indeed consume 20-25 watts more than its senior cousin, and there is no mistake in that. Anyway, there is no competition with the Radeon HD 5870. Based on a more modest GPU, the latter card is more economical than any GF100-based product from Nvidia.

The nonstandard cooling system from Palit is good, keeping the GPU temperature at only 80°C, which is 5°C lower than that of the reference card. You shouldn’t forget, however, that the Palit throws some of the hot air back into the system case whereas the reference card exhausts all of it to the outside. Proper ventilation is a requirement. It is necessary for any gaming platform, though.

The Palit GeForce GTX 470 is also good in terms of noisiness. Although not exactly silent (which can hardly be achieved with the GF100 chip), this card with its original cooler is far quieter than the reference one. In 2D mode it is quieter than the old reference coolers from Nvidia that used to be exemplary in terms of noiselessness. When under load, the card becomes audible amidst the noise from the other components of the working testbed but, unlike the reference cooler, produces a softer and less irritating noise. Coupled with the good temperature, this proves that the Palit GeForce GTX 470 indeed has a very good cooler.

We were rather skeptical about the overclockability of the Palit card. It is a daunting task to develop a good PCB design with a memory bus over 256 bits wide, but it is even more difficult to create a PCB that would have higher overclockability than the reference one. However, Palit succeeded and we got impressive results.

The GPU frequencies of 780/1560 MHz are an excellent result for a GeForce GTX 470 considering that our reference sample could only achieve 725/1450 MHz. We’ve got a 28.3% frequency growth and do not expect many other GTX 470 cards to be able to repeat this feat. The memory chips overclocked well, too. They were stable at a frequency of 890 (3560) MHz. Although not high by the standards of GDDR5, this is indeed a good result considering the 320-bit memory bus. We won’t guarantee that all other samples of the Palit GeForce GTX 470 are going to be that good at ordinary overclocking, but overclockers should certainly take a look at this model.

That’s the end of the descriptive part of our review. We will now proceed to the practical one. We must note that, despite its nonstandard design, the Palit card worked in SLI mode easily together with the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 we had reviewed earlier (it is a copy of the reference card from Nvidia).