Originally Posted by Methanoid 
evidence? I at least posted a link showing Nvidia producing more heat.. and thats an independent source who quotes where all his info comes from...
Edit: I found your link a little hard to read, but if I am reading it correctly, it shows the gives 59W for the 4870, 36W for the 4850, 40W for the 260 and 46W for the 280. I suppose that you are right if you stick with the lower end 4000 cards as you seem to be, with their rather impressive 10W, but the upper end 4000 cards aren't particularly great compared to their less powerful siblings or comparably powerful nVidia offerings.
For the upper end cards though, all the following shows the 4850 use around the same level of power as the 200 series and the 4870 a lot more.. on idle.
Anandtech Ars Technica Tweaktown Legit Review Hot Hardware PC Perspective Tech Report Extreme Tech Originally Posted by ExHail Yeah that's right at idle the nVidia card is slightly lower(and its only by a few W so nothing to go crazy about tbh) than the ATI cards at the moment but at load the ATI cards are far better.
If you play games a lot then the ATI card uses less power but if it sits idle they are pretty much the same.
I agree that nVidia is much worse when it comes to power consumption under load, but if we go with Anandtech (I trust them most out of the above sites) the difference at idle is more than what I would describe as 'a few W' in the case of the 4870. In their test system, it works out to be 45W between the 4870 and the GTX 280. Going from one card to the other increase the system power consumption by 28%, so the difference between the cards must be even more than that. That's rather significant in my opinion. In contrast, the difference under load is about 35W, which I agree is significant (but actually less than the difference under idle). So I can't agree with both part of your conclusion, at least going by Anandtech's data.
I don't have the time to work out the difference in absolute terms/% across all the other reviews listed above, but a quick glance at a couple of others. Using some rough calculations in my head (feel free to check and work out more thoroughly if you doubt it - I would if I had the time), the 45W gap is possibly unique to Anandtech, but 35+W isn't, and the difference between the two cards are idle is greater than at load (in other word, the GTX 280 is better than the 4870 at being idle than the 4870 is better than the GTX 280 at load from a power consumption perspective). There are many reasons why I prefer the upper end HD 4000-series over the GTX200 series, but power consumption is not one of them unless you play games more than you leave your PC idling - which is not true in my case.