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.






While the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2's idle power consumption is quite a bit higher than the GeForce GTX 285's, it's not so high that it is a cause for concern - it is only 0.5W more power hungry than our Radeon HD 4870 1GB for example, even despite using a pair of RV770 GPUs compared to the 4870's single RV770.

At load, the 4850 X2 uses around 20W more power than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285 - that's not as significant as it sounds and only represents a 5.8 percent increase. Overall, we're fairly impressed with what Sapphire has managed to achieve with its dual-GPU behemoth when it comes to energy efficiency. Saying it's energy efficient compared to the GTX 285 is of course a stretch, but that's mainly down to the massive gulf in idle power consumption - had Sapphire managed to somehow lower the card's idle consumption, then we would have been all the more impressed.