PowerColor HD 4890 PCS 1 GB Review

Name: PowerColor HD 4890 PCS 1 GB
Brand: PowerColor

W1zzard

on Apr 30th, 2009,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: PowerColor

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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 i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 Kindly supplied by Gigabyte
Memory:	2x 1024MB OCZ DDR3 Platinum @ 1140 MHz 6-6-6-19
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	BFG ES-800 800W
Software:	Windows Vista SP1

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

Ouch! The PowerColor HD 4890 PCS is a juice sucking beast in idle and load. Even though it clocks down to 500 / 1100 MHz in idle, this can not make much of a difference.