Power consumption
So what happens when you plug a graphics chip with 222 million transistors running at 400MHz into your AGP slot? I got my trusty watt meter and took some readings to find out. I tested the whole system, as shown in our Testing Methods section, to see how many watts it pulled. The monitor was plugged into a separate power source. I took readings with the system idling at the Windows desktop and with it running the real-time HDR lighting demo at 1024x768 full-screen. For the "under load" readings, I let the demo run a good, long while before taking the reading, so the card had plenty of time to heat up and kick on its cooler if needed.

At idle, the NVIDIA chips do a nice job of cutting their power consumption. Under load, the GeForce 6800 Ultra can really suck up the juice. Surprisingly, though, it's not much worse than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.