EVGA 9800 GTX+ 512MB Video Card Review

Temperature Testing & Acoustics

As expected, the change to a 55nm manufacturing process has a positive impact on the overall temperatures displayed by the 9800 GTX+ when compared to the 9800 GTX. This is actually a lot more than we had hoped and it seems to benefit the acoustical footprint of this card as well. Subjectively, it was slightly quieter than the older 9800 GTX+ which means it was damn-near silent.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Without a doubt, the efficiency numbers really jumped out at me since the results ended up being exactly the opposite of what I expected. I thought I was going to see nearly the same power consumption between the GTX+ and the stock-clocked GTX due to the former’s increased clock speeds. Well folks, I was wrong since even with the additional speeds on both the memory and the core, the 55nm EVGA 9800 GTX+ is quite a bit less power hungry than the outgoing 65nm card.