FYI:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-285-review--3way-sli/3
Power requirement
We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC.
The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We look at the recorded maximum WATT peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. From a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is pretty good with the new 55nm products.
Sidenote: we recently upgraded our test-platform, which by itself utilizes a lot of energy.
It's Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.7 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).
The ASUS motherboard also allows adding power phases for stability, which we enabled as well. I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to these settings and then add the CPU overclock. Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is much higher than your average system.
System in IDLE = ~200 Watt
System with GPU in FULL Stress = 385 Watt
The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly 385 Watts, and for a PC with this high-end card, this is excessive but remains within acceptable levels.
GeForce GTX 285 SLI (x3)
IDLE WATT: 262 .FULL LOAD: 701
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