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.



See the Performance Analysis page for analysis of these results.

Thermal Performance

Putting realistic, repeatable load on a GPU to get a decent idea of it's real world thermal output has long been something we've experimented here at bit-tech. We've found that Synthetic benchmarks such as FurMark thrash the GPU constantly, which simply isn't reflective of how GPU will be used when gaming. It's such a hardcore test that any GPU under test is almost guaranteed to hit it's thermal limit, the mark at which the card's firmware will kick in, speeding up the fan to keep the GPU withib safe temperature limits.

Conversely, simply leaving a game like Crysis running at a certain point also isn't reflective of real world use. There's no guarantee that the GPU is being pushed as hard as other titles might do, and the load will vary from play through to play through.

Eventually then, we've decided to use 3DMark06's Canyon Flight test as a real world representative, repeatable graphics test. It's a ferociously demanding test, pushing graphics cards to their limit, but also containing peaks and troughs in performance that match real world game play.

As the test is so demanding and GPU limited, we've set 3DMark to run the test at 1280x1024 with 0xAA and 16xAF (enabled in the driver), constantly looping the test for thirty minutes and recording the maximum GPU Delta T (the difference between the temperature of the GPU and the ambient temperature in our labs).



See the Performance Analysis page for analysis of these results.