I know what the difference is.
Who gives a damn how much heat it actually produces if it's idling at 70C? It could be 10W, fine, then the heatsink sucks. Means the card sucks.
Or it could be producing 100W of heat in idle (70C still), then the power saving tech sucks. The cooler might not be so terrible. But who cares? The card still sucks.
And I am talking about the cards that are being released in 2010 fyi. The older stuff is irrelevant.
Edit: I do not mean to appear harsh. But there are just so many ways to make a gfx card run cool and quiet that it's not funny. We've seen very cool running cards come out recently (5xxx series). I see no reason why Nvidia cannot do the same.





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