| Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Tim White - Edited by Olin Coles | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 01 February 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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VGA Power ConsumptionLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to current demands, and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards suddenly becoming "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that I get from various manufacturers every day, and get right to the point: your computer hasn't been doing much to help save energy... at least up until now. To measure isolated video card power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:
* Results are accurate to within +/- 5W.
As you can see the HD 4670 sports the lowest wattage out of any other card charted. Only 9 Watts at idle. This card would pay for itself over time. Even at full load the card is only using 70 Watts. That is nearly 1/2 of the power consumption of the lowest ranked card on that chart. You've seen the benchmark charts and now this chart. Add them together and you can assume this card gets 66%-100% of their performance with about 50% of the electric bill. Power/watt is very good for this card. This equals money savings over the other cards compared every month, not just once at the point of purchase. This seems to be a new thing for ATi as their top cards seem to the the opposite.
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