Power Consumption:

On top of our graphics performance testing, we have also measured the power consumption of the HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX 512MB graphics card at both idle and load. For this we used the same test system as we've used across all of our performance testing.

The system was configured as follows:

• Core 2 Duo E6750 (operating at 2.66GHz -- 8x333MHz)
  
• Gigabyte X38-DS5 motherboard (Intel X38 Express)
  
• 2 x 1GB OCZ FlexXLC PC-9200 memory (operating in dual-channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12 timings)
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB SATA hard drive
  
• PC Power & Cooling 750W Silencer
  
• Windows Vista Ultimate x86

For our idle testing, we left the systems 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 (DirectX 9 mode was used for the Radeon X1950 Pro) and measured the peak power consumption in this section of the title. 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.



The HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX 512MB's idle power is in line with PowerColor's factory-overclocked Radeon HD 3850 card, but it's a little higher than both the Radeon HD 3850 256MB and Radeon HD 3870 512MB reference cards. That said, it's still around 6W less than the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT's idle power consumption and 10W less than Zotac's factory-overclocked card.

Loaded energy consumption, which is arguably less of a concern to most of us, is quite a bit higher than both the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme PCS 512MB's and the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT's power draw, and it's only 5W more frugal than Nvidia's appreciably faster GeForce 8800 GT 512MB.