Power consumption is one of the highlights of the GF110 GPU. Compared to the GTX480, power consumption has been greatly reduced such that the GTX570 uses around 70W less power. The latter even compares favourably to the HD6970, its nearest competitor. The higher than usual idle power consumption is due to the card not clocking down at idle with the dual screen setup being used. Otherwise the clock speed would be reduced dramatically for even cooler and less power hungry operation. Nvidia set their goal to provide better performance at reduced power consumption with their GF110 derivatives and it is clear that they have achieved that. The slightly lower power consumption when fully overclocked leads me to think that Nvidia’s power saving feature was kicking in to limit the TDP when stress testing.