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).



The HIS Radeon HD 4830's power consumption at both idle and load is excellent - it uses around 30W less power than the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT at load, which is pretty impressive considering how the two match up in performance. Of course, the 8800 GT is over a year old now, so these kind of efficiency gains are expected when you factor in process technology and power efficiency advancements.