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

Compared to the previous HD 2600 XT, the power consumption of the card is down about 10% which makes sense if you consider a shrink by 15% with the GPU being one of the main power consumers, but not the only one. Also the PowerColor HD 3650 uses GDDR3 memory which has a slightly higher power draw than the GDDR4 on the 2600 XT. Overall, I would say that AMD has sucessfully engineered the HD 3650 to offer higher performance per Watt at a lower price.