GTX 970 power draw question.

kol12

Honorable
Jan 26, 2015
2,109
0
11,810
According to HWiNFO my GTX 970 is pulling a maximum of 193 W while gaming. Nvidia specs state a max of 145W. Can they pull more if they need to?
 
Solution
Yeah that's true. Remember seeing ~340W total system draw on the Colorful iGame GTX 970. No GTX 970 probably uses more than 250w power maximum on It's own


Well, if they couldn't, you couldn't overclock them very well, could you? :)
Plus, if youa re talking about Furmark, that may exceed the specs even on stock as it is absolutely gruellign for th GPU.
 
Heck 290 watts, that must be high voltage and overclock... Ok so Nvidia does allow power headroom for overclocking... I didn't realize that another 100-170 Mhz core clock and 250Mhz memory clock could raise the power draw by that much...
 


The TDP advertised by Nvidia is a sort of avereage in full load and you are looking at peak. So it's more complicated than it just beeing your overclock.
 


It was just while gaming, +170Mhz core clock, + 250Mhz memory clock and stock voltage.
 


It's still very much ok. See above.
 


Before I pick a solution, are you quite sure 290 watts is safe for the GTX 970?
 


Under ''enthusiast-ish'' clock speeds with heavy load tests/stress tests it can pull up to 290w. Is it safe? Yes, well partially depends on your power supply. Will your GTX 970 ever pull that much? Most likely not. Most gaming don't test the GPU as much as stress tests. You'd probably be much lower than that, not that 290 watts would be a big problem of some sorts most likely. Think the MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G could pull up to 247 watts in stress tests for example.
 


Ok, so where did you hear about the 290 watts? Has Nvidia ever released what the maximum power draw for the GTX 970 is? Is must be nearing maximum?
 


No, man it's gonna burn your house down :)))
WTF? How many times do you need to hear that it's ok?
 


As per RFCProd's stress test links it's not uncommon for graphics cards to be using up to 300 watts.

I'm pulling 190-200 watts with my OC'd GTX 970.
 


Like I said, the links are showing the power draw for the WHOLE system, not just the graphics card.

overclocked 970 I can believe it could get near 200w, but not 300w (other more power hungry cards could, but not a 970).
 
I'm pretty sure the hexus.net link is listing the cards total power draw not the systems but yeah 250w for the 970 sounds about right, who knows maybe even more.

The question is answered really, Nvidia allows for power headroom...
 


Read it again, it says its for the whole system.