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 Palit Radeon HD 4850 Sonic manages to deliver some pretty interesting power consumption numbers - it uses less power than any other card tested here at both idle and load. However, it's difficult to ascertain whether this is related to the redesigned PCB and power circuitry or if, indeed, the card we've tested just has another GPU that's not as power hungry as the others we've tested. This was the case with the HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ 4 TurboX and so we can't rule it out here.