Power
'Power and Efficiency' is what NVIDIA have been hailing from the hills since the release of the 750Ti and 1st gen Maxwell.
The big question is does GM206 draw less power than previous GPUS? Yes, but, we would expect it to, as most GTX 960s have only a single power connector and vary from 120 to 150W TDP. Note that our Firestrike performance was faster than the others and the card used less power getting there.
Manually setting the fan to 100% speed uses an extra 5 watts of power. users should never see 100% in any normal use and we don't recommend it be used anyway.
Maxwell, like Kepler features more power state levels so that the GPU can clock as low as possible during desktop idle or light load as well as shutdown unnecessary gates. AMD have typically used fixed 300 MHz speed for their idle clock.
