The normalized gains, which determines the intrinsic photoconduction (PC) efficiencies, have been defined and compared for the gallium nitride (GaN) nanowires (NWs) grown by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). By excluding the contributions of experimental parameters and under the same light intensity, the CVD-grown GaN NWs exhibit the normalized gain which is near two orders of magnitude higher than that of the MBE-ones. The temperature-dependent time-resolved photocurrent measurement further indicates that the higher photoconduction efficiency in the CVD-GaN NWs is originated from the longer carrier lifetime induced by the higher barrier height ( B 160 ? 30 mV) of surface band bending. In addition, the experimentally estimated barrier height at 20 ? 2 mV for the MBE-GaN NWs, which is much lower than the theoretical value, is inferred to be resulted from the lower density of charged surface states on the non-polar side walls. 2012 American Institute of Physics.