I've got an AGP Radeon 9800 Pro, which was pretty power-hungry for its time but a welterweight by today's standards. How much power does this baby draw when I'm just sitting around using Word or Firefox? And does cranking it down the clock/memory with ATITool reduce power consumption in any meaningful way?

~30W.

Xbitlabs 9800Pro measurements



Heat decreases linearly with frequency, but quadratically with voltage; so you should see some reduction (~5W); remember, every little counts!

Either ATITool or a new SATA drive blew my Windows install and I've been out of commission for a week! Horrible, it's like having a sick child or something. Must have spent 20+ hours figuring out how to reinstall (turns out I ALSO had faulty Windows disks)


Are you pulling my leg???

btw, that is a great resource you're pointing to at X-bit labs. The updated version is here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... noise.html

Great to know ppl are out there testing this stuff, whatever the reason (power or noise savings).

Why would he be pulling any legs? There will be reductions with both frequency decreases and voltage decreases. A voltage decrease has a FAR greater effect though. If you want to shrink the voltage, you'll have to do some soldering and also figure out a stable mhz.

Well, the winky for starters There's that famous joke page about how overclocking will allow your TV card to pull in HD from around the globe, so, anyway...

Yeah, sadly my mobo allows me to increase my voltage but not decrease it. It's also set to "Auto" overclock by default, so I think that every once in a while when the GPU freezes up for whatever reason and I reboot, the BIOS claims that "Overclocking failed." Anyway, that's not the point, the point is that my mobo allows OVERclocking but AFAIK not underclocking. And now I've stopped trusting ATITool