NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 GF100 DX11 Video Card Review

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged
it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.7.0 at 1920×1200 resolution.

Power Consumption Results: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 used 20% more power than the MSI R5870 Lighting at idle. The difference is even more apparent when you look at the numbers under load where the GTX 480 uses 27% more power than the MSI R5870 Lighting. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 power consumption is totally eclipsed by the GTX 480 by 60% under load. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 is clearly a
power-hungry beast.