VGA card power dissipation

kike_1974 · Post by **kike_1974** » Fri Jan 25, 2008 6:41 pm

Radeon HD 3850 power consumption at xbitlabs:

Updated tables including this data:

Sorted by peak 3D power consumption:

Sorted by idle power consumption:

neptunefix · Post by **neptunefix** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 5:45 pm

How would the HD 3450 256mb card fit into the scheme of things, as far as heat goes? I would specifically love to see the numbers for that card, and to know if it gets hotter than teh HD 2400XT when doing normal 2D stuff (photoshop). I just want a snappy little card that is the coolest card possible. I wouldnt imagine a video card would speed a system up as far as normal (non-gaming and non-rendering) computing goes.

kike_1974 · Post by **kike_1974** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 3:53 pm

According to these sites:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/652/13/
http://www.hothardware.com/articles/ATI ... ve/?page=9

Idle power consumption of the HD 3650 and 3450 is almost the same than HD 3850.

neptunefix · Post by **neptunefix** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 5:19 pm

So, for the purposes of cool and quiet, modern 2D cards, the 2400XT should be quieter. Although, if you want HD encoding (i dont) then the 3450 looks pretty impressive and inexpensive.

bexx · Post by **bexx** » Mon May 12, 2008 1:00 am

"For example, you can use a multimeter to measure the current and voltage at the 12V power input, that is relatively easy. However, this doesn't account for power usage through the PCI-e slot. "

Its possible.. Tyan S5396 work station board has a seperate 12v power connector on it that only powers the top pci-e slot... figure this out cause I didn't have all the power connectors needed. Got Tyan to confirm too. Using this you could basicaly get perfect current draw on 12v rail. I think all PCIe cards draw almost nothing on the 5v rail... no idea on how to get this... but this isn't the biggest issue imo. The biggest issue left woudl be how do you get 'peak' 3d power draw? What game / benchmark / whatever?

Modo · Post by **Modo** » Mon May 12, 2008 2:00 am

bexx wrote: The biggest issue left woudl be how do you get 'peak' 3d power draw? What game / benchmark / whatever?

I'd say a benchmark or stress tool, like rthdribl or the ATITool artifact checker. Games tend to be processor bound in various circumstances, and the load tends to be uneven even if processor power isn't the issue.

Schlotkins · Post by **Schlotkins** » Sun May 18, 2008 7:08 am

Does the Radeon 2400 XT still have the lowest idel power consumption? I have a x1300 now and would love to save 10 watts at idle.

Thanks,
Chris

tehcrazybob · Post by **tehcrazybob** » Sun May 18, 2008 7:37 am

Yes, the 2400XT is probably the lowest-consuming discrete card available. An Intel GMA onboard system will be lower still, but those are obviously difficult to add retrospectively.

In the spirit of this thread, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date list I've been able to find anywhere. Apologies if it's already been posted here and I missed it:
http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354

Schlotkins · Post by **Schlotkins** » Sun May 18, 2008 9:01 am

Thanks for the reply. My guess is most of the 2400XT cards are just 'reference' boards and that the "best" memory in terms of power consumption on the 2400 is GDDR3. (The review @ xbit mentions GDDR4 in the title but my guess is that's only for the 2600.)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... html#sect0

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102699

Thanks!
Chris

millex · Post by **millex** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 12:25 pm

How is it really with the idling temeprature of passive radeons 2400pro/xt please? Does anybody have personal experience with it? I found not very optimistic reviews on newegg:

Cons: The heatsink on this card gets very hot. A customer of mine actually claimed to have smelled melting plastic from her computer earlier today, and I can think of no other culprit. For the money we will be putting into a PCI fan, it would have made more sense to have bought a fan cooled 2600 in the first place. Maybe it's not too late.

thank you.

more here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102699

Ant6n · Post by **Ant6n** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 9:36 pm

finally we got numbers for the hd 4850, from a half way reliable source (xbitlabs):

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... html#sect0

btw, while at it, i'll put up the graph for the 9600gt, which was linked in some thread a couple of pages back.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... 512gs.html

wdekler · Post by **wdekler** » Thu Jul 10, 2008 10:30 pm

Lets hope that the 4850 idle power listed here is still being worked on and will go down with the 8.7 drivers as posted in the other thread.

Ant6n · Post by **Ant6n** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 6:15 pm

...hd4350, 4670

source: xbitlabs (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... html#sect0)

ex.treme · Post by **ex.treme** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 10:02 am

New low consumption card are 4350 and 4550. Under 20w at load.
HD4350 have DDR2 memory, 64 bit
HD4550 have DDR3 memory, but just 64bit.

Consumption is very similar, but power is not.
HD4350 do in 3dmark 2006 2300-2600 points, HD4550 do 3700-4600 points.
Price: 4350 - from 33$ , 4550 512mb- around 50$

Sources:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/HD_4550_passive/
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... 50_13.html
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3420&p=6

Reinier · Post by **Reinier** » Sat Jan 17, 2009 1:09 am

Hi, Great topic, but still I am a bit overwhelmed with the new vga cards.
I currently use the TNN 500 AF with a core2duo and a 7900 NVidia VGA card. I intent to update it to a quad-core 3Ghz, and now I am looking for a better VGA card, that does not exceef the 75W heat dissipation the chassis can handle. I'd prefer NVidia and 2x DVI-D outputs. Any suggestions?

maf718 · Post by **maf718** » Thu Jan 22, 2009 8:22 am

Here are a couple of new articles dealing with graphics card power consumption with tables listing most of the newer cards:

Tomshardware - How much power does your graphics card need?

Hardspell - 53 graphic cards power consumption contrasted

Ihmemies · Post by **Ihmemies** » Mon Feb 02, 2009 4:48 pm

Look at this bad baby.. GTX295 from xbitlabs:

ACook · Post by **ACook** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 2:51 am

guess this is the right place to post some numbers I got the other week testing some of my old cards.

This is just for reference, if you have an old system you want to make a fileserver of or something, and any gfx will do to make it work, AGP or PCI. Over the years I've gathered a few cards, and while I was clearing out all my other pc stuff I thought I'd better test these to see if they even worked.

numbers are total W numbers for an old board, think it had a Celeron 500 and an oem 235W PSU.

Code: Select all

                               MB   bios   idle        
S3 Virge                 PCI    2     44     32    passive
Matrox G450 DH           AGP          48     34    passive
Diamond/Nvidia Riva TNT  AGP   16     51     36    passive
Asus LP 7100             AGP          51     37    passive
Asus 7100/Deluxe/Combo   AGP   32     56     41    passive
Asus 7700                AGP   32     57     44        fan
Asus 9450TD              AGP          66     50        fan

All could do 1024x768 ,24bit @75Hz minimum in XP, so are perfectly fine for remote controlling and surfing.

These result made me change the deluxe combo I had just slapped unthinkigly in my 24/7 internet machine to the riva tnt, (have a use for the 2 lower cards) and finally undervolting the cpu as well, which saved me 30W in total.

Those old 2MB pci cards are very cool running and should do fine for most things, so I'll be looking out for any in the rummage/rubbish bin of old pc parts...
Plus they work on both AGP and PCI-E systems, handy if you don't have a 2nd PCI-E card around when you're switching your working system to a new one.

bentan77 · Post by **bentan77** » Tue Mar 03, 2009 1:02 am

A new 4670?
The GTS250
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16504/10
Only seen one review so far but the power consumption looks very good.

alecmg · Post by **alecmg** » Tue Mar 03, 2009 3:35 am

bentan77 wrote:A new 4670?
The GTS250
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16504/10
Only seen one review so far but the power consumption looks very good.

Looks to me like the new 4850. Power numbers barely lower, performance barely higher than 4850.

aristide1 · Post by **aristide1** » Thu Apr 09, 2009 11:40 am

My new hero is the 55nm GTX260.

216 shaders barely over 100 watts.

Ant6n · Post by **Ant6n** » Fri Apr 10, 2009 8:28 am

4890 doesn't seem so bad, either.

Kung Fu Hung-Su · Post by **Kung Fu Hung-Su** » Tue Apr 14, 2009 7:50 am

aristide1 wrote:

My new hero is the 55nm GTX260.
216 shaders barely over 100 watts.

Great observation. I think I have my next card :]

Ant6n · Post by **Ant6n** » Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:08 pm

gts250, which appears to be a direct competitor to the upcoming hd4770

source: http://xbitlabs.com/articles/video/disp ... html#sect0

Ant6n · Post by **Ant6n** » Mon Apr 27, 2009 5:25 pm

source: http://xbitlabs.com/articles/video/disp ... 770_5.html

SoopahMan · Post by **SoopahMan** » Wed Jul 29, 2009 5:14 pm

Yes, the Radeon HD 4890 seems to be the current efficiency winner, at least if your goal is playing modern games... which if it isn't... why are you buying a 3D card?

I went over the performance numbers and power consumption for about 80 different cards on various review sites, and found not only the above power numbers, but also that the 4890 is near the top in all single-card reviews, but if you turn Anti-Aliasing on, it CRUSHES the competition. With maximum Anti-Aliasing settings (hard to find many performance numbers with this enabled), the 4890 is way out ahead of any other single-card, single-GPU configuration. For whatever reason, ATI's approach lays waste to nVidia's once Anti-Aliasing is turned up. And obviously going dual-card or dual-GPU shoots your power usage sky high.

I've long felt that the difference for pixel-based art is anti-aliasing. Pixar's movies have always looked so good in part because of the extreme levels of anti-aliasing applied from the very beginning.

I now have my 4890 running in a 350w system, and can for example play Spore with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering both turned to maximum and the framerate sticks at 60 (the max because I have VSync enabled). And the graphics are gorgeous.

swivelguy2 · Post by **swivelguy2** » Wed Jul 29, 2009 6:00 pm

SoopahMan wrote:Yes, the Radeon HD 4890 seems to be the current efficiency winner, at least if your goal is playing modern games... which if it isn't... why are you buying a 3D card?

What about the 4770? Using the power draw numbers above, and the 3dMarks score from Tom's Hardware,

HD 4890: 19912 3dMarks / 120.3 watts = 166 3dMarks per watt

HD 4770: 14528 3dMarks / 49.5 watts = 293 3dMarks per watt

It's to be expected that the 4770 will win in performance per watt, because it's the only card available using the newest/smallest GPU technology. Also, stock fanless editions are on the way, which is nice.

EsaT · Post by **EsaT** » Sat Oct 31, 2009 2:54 am

I wonder why HD5870 hasn't been posted in here:
Fastest single card by good margin and practically as fast as double cards of previous generation but with very decent load consumption and plain marvellous idle/desktop consumption for such high end card:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... html#sect0

qiqi1021 · Post by **qiqi1021** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:51 am

Everything covered and regularly updated: The Truth About Graphics Power Requirements V2

Mats · Post by **Mats** » Thu Apr 08, 2010 5:12 am

Watt.

VGA card power dissipation

Advice souht for passive VGA card cooling