NVIDIA has been trying to make them greener. According to some partners of the company, there is BIOS update incoming for several GeForce 9 series graphic cards. With the BIOS updated, 9800GT, 9800GTX and 9500GT will have a lower power consumption when idle.

If you have tried 9500GT, you may notice the card has a 2D/3D clock, when idle the core clock can be as low as 216MHz. But the memory frequency and shader keeps unchanged. Maybe this time NV can fix this small problem.