AMD multimonitor power consumption success

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Mr Evil
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Joined: Fri Jan 20, 2006 10:12 am
Location: UK
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AMD multimonitor power consumption success

Post by Mr Evil » Wed Nov 06, 2013 9:09 am

Last year I purchased a Radeon 7770, and was disappointed by the high idle power consumption, even when using two identical DisplayPort monitors. It was looking something like this:

Code: Select all

               1 monitor    2 monitors
Core clock     300MHz       400MHz
Mem clock      150MHz       1300MHz
Core voltage   0.85V        1.2V
AC Power       65W          75W
Now I have a Radeon R9 280X. It's supposed to be architecturally almost the same as the previous 7xxx cards, so I wasn't expecting any difference, but I became curious today and tested it. Contrary to the previous results, I now get the following at idle:

Code: Select all

               1 monitor    2 monitors
Core clock     300MHz       300MHz
Mem clock      150MHz       150MHz
Core voltage   0.85V        0.85V
AC Power       69W          71W
Whereas there was a 10W delta between 1 and 2 monitors with the 7770, now it's only 2W (note that the idle power consumption with 1 monitor is actually about the same as the 7770; the old figures are only different because I have changed other parts since then).

I would expect power consumption to revert to the previous bad behaviour if using multiple non-DP monitors, but I'm not going to test that.

mkk
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Joined: Sun Sep 05, 2004 1:51 pm
Location: Gefle, Sweden
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Re: AMD multimonitor power consumption success

Post by mkk » Wed Nov 06, 2013 11:48 am

Good to hear there are some chances of success. Otherwise even the truly new R9 290 line seems not to have been improved at least when using the more common connectors.

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