When NVIDIA was doing their press briefings for their new Maxwell architecture they frequently talked up its power efficiency and how the power efficiency is four times greater than where it was four years ago with Fermi... But how is Maxwell and NVIDIA's power efficiency compared to hardware from ten years ago? In this article we have done fresh benchmarks -- with power consumption, thermal, and performance-per-Watt measurements -- of NVIDIA's mid-range graphics cards from the week-old GeForce GTX 750 Ti to as far back as the GeForce 6600GT (NV43) graphics card from 2004.

First of all, if you didn't already read our GM107 Maxwell review, be sure to read NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti "Maxwell": A Great Mid-Range GPU For Linux Users. That article has benchmarks from 21 different NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux, so even if you're not interested in the GM107 specifically, you can at least see some new Linux GPU numbers at large. Prior to the weekend I also published many more NVIDIA Maxwell Linux benchmarks from Ubuntu with NVIDIA's Linux graphics driver.