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).



Wow! As is clear from the graphs the customised power regulation system used by Gainward has significantly improved power consumption in comparison to a stock HD 4870 1GB. While there's no real difference at idle, the drop of 16W in power consumption at load is astonishing and really demonstrates how much more efficient the Gainward HD 4870 1024MB Golden Sample's power management system is.