X-bit labs

XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition Graphics Card Review (page 5)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 07/27/2006 | 11:49 AM ]

Power Consumption and Overclocking

Following the usual testing procedure we apply to each graphics card that enters our labs, we measured the power consumption of the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition on a modified testbed configured in this way:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
• Intel Desktop Board D925XCV
• PC4300 DDR2 SDRAM (2x512MB)
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c

The measurements were performed with a digital multimeter Velleman DVM850BL (0.5% measurement accuracy). We put the GPU under load by launching the first SM3.0 graphics test from 3DMark06 and running it in a loop at 1600x1200 resolution and with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering. The Peak 2D load was created by means of the 2D Transparent Windows test from Futuremark’s PCMark05 benchmarking suite. The results follow below:

The XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition really has a higher power draw than the standard 7600 GT, but the difference is small, not bigger than 2.5W in the 3D mode. The device mostly loads the +12V line; less than 1W is consumed across the +3.3V line. This is characteristic of the GeForce 7800 GT and 7900 GT, too.

The results of the GeForce 7600 GT in the power consumption tests are the best in its class as the ATI Radeon X1800 GTO needs 12W more power than Nvidia’s solution and is comparable to the more advanced GeForce 7900 GT in its appetite.

Our attempt to overclock our sample of the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition ended in a failure. After all, the card already comes overclocked by the manufacturer, and the hot weather in our area impeded our overclocking tests, too. So, we couldn’t increase the graphics core frequency even by 5MHz because the card didn’t pass ForceWare’s built-in stability test at such a core clock rate. So, we stopped at that and benchmarked the XFX card at its default frequencies, i.e. 590/800 (1600) MHz.