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 power consumption of the Palit HD 4870 Sonic is slightly higher than that of the reference design card, which is caused by the higher clock speeds and second fan.
Palit has set the 2D/3D low power clocks (when the card is idle) to 500 MHz core clock and the normal 3D high clock memory frequency. Unfortunately ATI has still not figured out yet how to switch memory clocks seamlessly without flickering, this could allow an additional power saving by reducing memory clock as well when idle.