nVidia GTX 560 power requirement revealed

As you all know, nVidia will be launching its GTX560 refresh to the popular GTX460 card on 25th January 2011. Going back to the early part of 2010, when the first Fermi cards began to surface, one of the biggest worries was power draw. Has nVidia got it right with the GTX 560? KitGuru takes out two bits of fuse wire and a torch bulb to see what the new card really needs.

Almost by accident, the Radeon series of cards became more ‘fuel efficient' back with the 2000 series. The cards had a problem with the AA engine and overall performance was negatively impacted. Unable to make a clear challenge for the overall performance crown, AMD (then ATI) pushed hard on value. It worked. As luck would have it, the world became more interested in efficiency, just as nVidia was taking the performance lead with the 8800 series.

The GTX480 was a power hog. While the card itself peaked around 60 frames per second in AvP at 2560×1600, it was hard to ignore the electrical requirement. It was also hard to ignore the fact that the card could deliver over 63 dBa.

So the mainstream has become more important. Most people will opt for cards that cost not much more than £200. When you consider that the early Radeon 6950 cards could have the BIOS updated to make them into 6970 cards at just over £200, then this area of the market is hugely competitive. Likewise, with nVidia's amazingly flexible GTX460, we have seen clocks from 675MHz right up to an O/C card hovering around 1GHz.

So, with a performance profile between the Radeon 6870 and 6950, how much power will the nVidia GTX 560 need to get you through the most intense games ?

KitGuru can reveal that the claimed draw will be 180w.

nVidia GTX 560 will only need 180 watts is a great headline for nVidia, but we'd like a personal guarantee from Jen Hsun Huang that putting the GTX560 into a system that needs 220 watts and running it off a 400w PSU would be fine for FurMark.

KitGuru says: There is a good flow of information about the GTX 560 coming out of Santa Clara these days – although you sometimes need to pick it up from the bars in downtown Taipei. We have more to follow. Stay tuned.

Does 180w seem likely? What do you folks think it really will be?

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