Power Consumption

On top of our graphics performance testing, we’ve also measured the power consumption of the tested graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used the same systems that we have used for our 3D performance testing.

For our idle testing, we left the cards idling on the desktop for ten minutes, recording the average draw at the wall socket. For load testing, we used our benchmark routine from Crysis in DirectX 10 mode and measured the peak power consumption throughout the benchmark. We tested the cards in a number of other scenarios and this proved to be the most intensive in all cases, so you can consider this to be a worst-case scenario.

Bear in mind that we have disabled all CPU-related power management options in the motherboard's BIOS so that we can highlight exactly how well the GPU's power management features are working (or not).



The RV770 GPU on the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 sample we have hear appears to be an absolute gem when it comes to power consumption - it ends up being the least power hungry card at idle by a fairly significant 6W and it uses 5W less power than the stock clocked Radeon HD 4850 when fully loaded. We wonder whether this translates into any tangible overclocking gains. And guess what, that's what comes next...