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

The ASUS EAH4890 TOP offers acceptable power consumption levels when compared to the HD 4890 reference design. The TOP card has higher clocks which explains the higher power draw. However, compared to other cards in ATI's lineup the performance per Watt is still way too high. One reason is that the GDDR5 memory clock can not be changed without a flickering. So ATI decided to run at the same memory clock even when the card is completely idle; this results in a much higher power draw.

These numbers will disappoint the SuperML fanboys who expected a considerably reduced power draw.