Nvidia's Attempt to Manipulate the GTX 980 Figures to Deceive the Press Worked !

Lynx · September 19, 2014

any kind measurement of an entire system wouldn't give you an accurate power consumption of a GPU, especially with diiferent kind of load.

the best measurement out there is from techpowerup which only measure the power consumption from PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot;

For this test, we measure the power consumption of only the graphics card via the PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot. A Keithley Integra 2700 digital multimeter with 6.5-digit resolution is used for all measurements. Again, the values here only reflect the card's power consumption as measured at its DC inputs, not that of the whole system.

Just like on GTX 750 Ti, NVIDIA's new architecture brings massive power consumption improvements. Non-gaming power consumption has been reduced even further, which increases the gap to AMD even more, especially in Blu-ray playback.

In gaming, GTX 980 shows impressive power consumption numbers that seemed impossible just a few months ago. The card is incredibly fast, yet super power efficient at the same time. In my opinion this is the key improvement in Maxwell, as power and heat is no longer an issue to scale up GPU performance, and these improvements will also serve as foundation for improvements in laptop and mobile gaming, where battery life matters even more.

AMD's recently released Tonga GPU (R9 285) uses significantly more power than GeForce GTX 980, yet GTX 980 is a lot faster at the same time. AMD better start innovating soon to stay competitive.