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).



As we were running with two graphics cards, we knew we'd get some pretty high load and idle power consumption figures, and weren't disappointed. It's fair to say that neither the 9800 GTX+ in SLI nor the 4850 in CrossFire could be called frugal, with the pair of 9800 GTX+ drawing more power than any other setup we've tested and the dual 4850s are on a par with the notoriously thirsty 4870 X2.

Figures at load don't get much better, with the two 9800 GTX+ drawing almost 450W at peak – enough to seriously worry a 550W power supply! The 4850s in CrossFire aren't too much better either, and are still noticeably more thirsty than Nvidia's most power hungry card, the GeForce GTX 280.