Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme 1GB Graphics Card Review
Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago
Power ConsumptionTo test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment.
On idle, the card uses relatively low amounts of power and at load it still falls below that of the 6870 cards we had for comparison meaning that sometimes newer isn’t always better.
