Quote:maybe geforce 690 or 590 or something like that
Still not even close. To my knowledge no video card in history has exceeded 300 watt power consumption under full load (excluding overclocked cards from extreme overclocking competitions of course).
Clarification:
Like you said the calculations are done based on hypothetical systems and refer to total system power consumption. They're extremely conservative about the measurements and use enthusiast grade cpus, motherboards, etc. so if it says that it requires a 500 watt power supply you can probably get away with 400 or even 350 watts. They figure that overestimating is way better than underestimating since people might complain about power issues if they underestimated the measurements. If it says 500 watts that means that no matter what other parts you use 500 watts will be enough.
Ultimately these measurements should just be ignored in favor of using a power calculator to estimate your total system power draw.
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-Ron Swanson
"I shall be a good politician, even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else for that matter. "
-Mark Antony