NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: Rounding Out The High End

Power Consumption

With fewer pipelines and lower clock speeds, the 7800 GT should require less power to operate. While that may not matter much for people with high-end desktop systems, there are many areas that would benefit from a cooler running GPU. Small form factor cases and laptops are two such areas, so let's see how the 7800 GT compares to the other cards.





Both Idle and Load power graphs clearly show that the 7800 GT is a superior performer. This card is much less power hungry than the 6800 Ultra and performs better across the board. These characteristics lend themselves very well to applications like mobile computing. With lower power consumption comes longer battery life, less heat, and more performance for portable computing.

The current trend in notebooks is to give as big a slice of the TDP as possible to the graphics card. A low power CPU is used in the system and terrific gaming performance is still available. The 2GHz and up Pentium M CPUs are quite capable of providing good gaming performance. If NVIDIA lowers the power needs on its mobile parts significantly, OEMs can afford to use more power for the CPU or cheaper (and lighter) cooling solutions. This is good news for anyone in the market for any type of mobile computer. Here's to hoping the GeForce Go 7 Series makes its debut sooner rather than later.