Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6 GHz (Wolfdale, 6144 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Intel P35
Memory:	2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2

In order to characterize a video card's power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The three result values are as following:

• Idle: Windows sitting at the desktop (1024x768 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed.
• Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (two per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
• Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Highest single reading

AMD has done a formidable job with the power consumption of their new card. Under idle the card is basically drawing as little power as possible with a total system power draw of 90W. When loaded the power consumption goes up but it still stays low with an average of less than 150W, again, for the whole system, not just the graphics card. This results in a best-in-class power consumption.