HIS HD 3870 IceQ3 Turbo 512 MB Review

Name: HIS HD 3870 IceQ3 Turbo 512 MB
Brand: HIS

W1zzard

on Mar 19th, 2008,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: HIS

Overclocking »

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.

Test System
CPU:	Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33 GHz (Conroe, 2x 2048 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte P35C-DS3R Intel P35
Memory:	2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 169.04 ATI: Catalyst 7.11

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

Just as expected, the card's power draw is slightly higher than that of the reference HD 3870. This is caused by the higher core and memory clocks. Overall the HIS 3870 IceQ3 has a fairly modest power consumption, especially in idle.