To obtain accurate results we have connected the system to a Power Angle power meter that has in turn been attached to a 1500watt UPS. This ensures only 120volt power is supplied to the PSU and removes an variances that could potential crop up because of brownouts and power spikes.
In order to stress the video card we have once again used Unigine’s Valley benchmark and ran it for 20 minutes to determine peak system power consumption. For idle results we have let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak idle power consumption.
As expected the PNY 960 Elite OC does indeed use more power than a reference GeForce GTX 960 but in the grand scheme of thing the amount of extra power it uses is negligible. This goes double when you consider the fact that the more expensive ASUS R9 280X uses a heck of a lot more power. In either case we would never base our purchase decision on power consumption as the differences between both sides would take years to make a difference.
