Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.


In order to characterize a video card's power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The three result values are as following:

• Idle: Windows sitting at the desktop (1024x768 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed.
• Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (two per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
• Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Highest single reading

Power consumption of the HIS HD 3850 IceQ3 is a bit higher than the HD 3850 and in idle higher than the HD 3870 as well. The HD 3850 has lower clocks and less memory which explains why the HIS card is more power hungry. The difference to the higher clocked HD 3870 is that the AMD HD 3870 uses GDDR4 memory while the HIS HD 3850 uses GDDR3. GDDR4 consumes less power, especially when in idle state.