VGA Power Consumption

Life 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 turning "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that gets sent 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.

A baseline test is taken with the system in an idle state. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the total system power displayed in Watts for each specified test product:

Our power consumption tests tell a much different story than the temperatures. The HD4870 is clearly the power hog at idle, while the other three cards all sit within about 9% of each other. At load, however, the HD5770 consumes much less power than the other cards. What's interesting, though, is how much more energy the ASUS GTS 450 consumes over the EVGA model. Both are overclocked by a similar amount, by the higher core voltage of the ASUS card is definitely revealed in this test. While probably not the best for the environment, this may appeal to enthusiasts; a higher core voltage can often help achieve a better overclock, which we look at in the next section.

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