Power Consumption (Idle and Gaming)

We tested the power consumption with a Watts Up? Pro power meter, using the device to record the total system power consumption at the wall socket, while we ran three sets of four runs of Crysis in DX10 at 1,920 x 1,200.

Using the data recorded by the meter we could determine the peak output, the consistent minimum and the average load over the entire run of tests.

As both ATI and Nvidia test benches are now identical Core i7 systems, we can accurately determine the apples to apples difference of what power both PCs take to run.


The HD 4890 is an extremely thirsty card and that hasn't changed with the Asus HD4890 Voltage Tweak, with the card slurping up a whopping 222 watts at idle. This rose to 233W when we applied our maximum overclock, making it the most power hungry single GPU graphics card we've ever tested when idle.


The spike in power consumption after overclocking is also very evident at load, with the Asus HD 4890 pulling down a massive 363W at peak when running our Crysis benchmark, roughly the same as Nvidia's GTX 275 and Sapphire similarly pre-overclocked Radeon HD 4890 Atomic.