Buried on the 17th page of Tom's Hardware's GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card review is a simple benchmark result that will dramatically disrupt the landscape of cryptocurrency mining:

As we learned from my introduction to the GTX 750 Ti, first-generation Maxwell cards exhibit a 35% peak performance boost per core and twice the performance per watt. They also blow Kepler hashrates out of the water. Based on what I'm seeing with the 750 Ti, Nvidia is poised to embarrass AMD in the performance-per-watt race — and that's a substantial factor when you're paying the inflated energy bills caused by mining.

Nvidia didn't breathe a word of Maxwell's seriously improved hashing ability in their marketing copy or press briefings, but Tom's Hardware discovered it, and I've been able to replicate their findings with multiple 750 Ti cards from both Nvidia and PNY.

What you're looking at in the image above is a hashrate of about 242kh/s using Nvidia's reference 750 Ti 1GB graphics card ($139). This is significant for several reasons. First, the 750 Ti is a 60Watt card and doesn't even require a PCI-E power connector. You could plug this card into a cheap box from HP or Dell with a 300W power supply and have power to spare. Second, the temperature never seems to breach 65 degrees Celsius, and it runs considerably quieter and cooler than the AMD 260x ($119), which achieves a peak hashrate of 206kh/s and consumes nearly 130Watts of power.