Power Consumption

This was probably the most fun we had in testing for this review: measuring the power consumption of the 3-way SLI setup. We plugged the entire system into our Extech power meter and bet on how much power it'd use. Let's just say that NVIDIA isn't too far off with its minimum PSU requirements, see for yourself.

At idle, our 3-way SLI testbed drew around 400W of power. To put that into perspective, this is more power than any of our normal CPU or GPU testbeds under full load...just sitting at the Windows desktop. The third 8800 Ultra manages to pull an extra 100W without trying. Now let's see how much power this thing needs when playing a game.

We started with Crysis, which is normally our most stressful game test. Normally doesn't apply here though as Crysis didn't scale well from 2 to 3 GPUs, the third graphics card only improved performance by a few percentage points at our most playable settings, thus power consumption won't hit its peak.

Averaging 660W of power, the 3-way SLI system is now using over 2x the power of a normal gaming system outfitted with an 8800 GT. But it gets better.

Bioshock gave us the best scaling we saw out of the lot, and thus the 3rd GPU is working its hardest in this test, meaning we should be able to get our Extech to produce some stunningly high numbers.

And stunningly high we got. The 3-way SLI system averaged 730W in Bioshock, and get this, we even saw the machine pull over 800W from the wall outlet.

I was talking to Matthew Witheiler, our first dedicated graphics editor here at AnandTech, I told him how much power the system used under load and while idle. His response? "JESUS". "No", I said, "not even Jesus needs this much power".