The GTX580 is indicative of Nvidia’s effort to lower power consumption, thermal and consequently the noise generated by their flagship cards. The GF110 is clearly a significant improvement over the previous GF100 core, drawing near 50W less than the GTX480 whilst maintaining superior performance. The lower power consumption was achieved by preventing leakages and implementing the power saving features discussed earlier on in a bid to keep the TDP in line. The ZOTAC was slightly more power hungry than the ASUS card at both idle and under load despite both following the same reference design. Impressively, the GTX580 proved to be more efficient that the Cayman based HD6970 from AMD.