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

While the idle power consumption is not spectacular it is still quite low. Under load the power consumption is among the lowest we have seen, but so is general performance of the card.

Nevertheless for a card with the potential uses of the HIS HD 4650 iSilence the power consumption is perfectly fine. What matters is that the passive heatsink can handle the heat output of the card and that is certainly the case.

Fan Noise

Since the card uses a completely passive cooler there is no noise at all. Unlike many high end cards, there are no electrical chirping noises coming from the card, not even under full load.