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).



This isn't the first time where we've experienced higher-than-expected idle power consumption on AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4000 series hardware - this time around, with the 4670, the card uses 13W more power than both Radeon HD 3800 series cards which doesn't seem to add up. At load though, the card redeems itself a little and power consumption is 15W less than the Radeon HD 3850 and quite a bit more frugal than the 3870 and XFX 9600 GSO, which is the most power-hungry in this test at both idle and load.