Is there a way to lower the power of a graphic card?

I recently obtained a GTX260 in favor of my former GT220. It's a better card, but with the unfortunate side of effect of being noisy as well as eating up a ton of power. Is there way to weaken the power of the card for simple tasks and bump up the power when I need to use it for gaming?|||You could use a piece of Overclocking software to Downclock your card. Unfortunately, nVidia cards don't come with a piece of overclocking software so you'll just have to search on google. ATI however, does come with one within the Catalyst Control Centre (CCC). Although you can not use it.|||It's power-usage is mostly determined by what it does. If it works harder (for instance when playing a game) it wil use more power. Powerusage is determined by the amount of labour performed and the efficiency at which this is done. I may assume the manufacturer wil have made the card as efficient as possible so better just rely on that.



The noisy fan is a feature of the card, best live with it or get another card. There may be a utility available to lower the fanspeed but that always has a danger of overheating the gpu. A real computer-geek might consider replacing the fan but apart from being tricky that also costs money. Also a fan doesn't use that much power. You might get some self-adhesive sound-isolation mats to put on the inside of your casing, this might lower the sound a bit.



PS: yup downclocking might be an idea when possible, didn't think of that....|||Yes, there are softwares called overclocking softwares for graphics cards, just google it|||You're trying to do something that happens automatically. Throttling based on usage has been common for years.