Power consumption
We measured total system power consumption at the wall socket using a watt meter. The monitor was plugged into a separate outlet, so its power draw was not part of our measurement. The idle measurements were taken at the Windows desktop, and cards were tested under load running a Doom 3 timedemo of our "trdemo2" in High Quality mode at 1280x1024 with 4X antialiasing.

Does the G70 really live up to its billing?

More or less. The GeForce 7800 GTX-based system draws less power at idle than the GeForce 6800 Ultra rig, and it draws a little more at peak. It is possible that the 7800 GTX system with a single card is pulling more load than the 6800 Ultra because the CPU is busier in the 7800 GTX system. In fact, that might help explain why the picture is slightly reversed in SLI, as our 6800 Ultra SLI rig pulls a little more juice at peak than the dual 7800 GTX setup. All in all, from a system-wide standpoint, the 7800 GTX's idle power consumption is definitely down compared to the GeForce 6800 Ultra's, and peak system power consumption is at least roughly comparable.

I'd like to give you some sound level readings for the 7800 GTX's cooler, but truth be told, that's almost impossible to measure for a couple of reasons. First, there is the clatter of the Asus A8N-SLI's super-annoying chipset cooling fan combined with the noise from the CPU cooler. Then there's the fact that the 7800 GTX cooler is very, very quiet, especially at idle, and our sound level meter can't measure sounds below a certain threshold. Subjectively, the 7800 GTX is quieter than both the GeForce 6800 Ultra and the Radeon X850 XT PE, without question.