Power Consumption

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 1920x1200.

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 HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo's idle power consumption is better than the reference card, but that's probably down to improvements made in the manufacturing process more than it is down to anything that HIS has done on its own. Nvidia's graphics cards are generally much more efficient at idle, though - even the GeForce GTX 295 uses less power at idle than the HIS card!

At load though, power consumption is more in line with the GeForce GTX 260-216 - it's around 14 watts more power hungry, which frankly isn't that bad with all things considered.