Power Consumption
With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. See details of our power consumption testing procedure on the test systems and procedures page.
After reading your review Ryan I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t like it as much as you, I would’ve taken XFX down a few more notches for having the cheek to print “The Ultimate Gaming Experience” on the box.
I agree, they definitely should have marketed it more towards the HTPC user. No one will ever buy this card for gaming because it is poor for gaming. This kind of card should come with single slot versions that have dual HDMI and single display port outputs (so it is capable of doing 4K playback). They should be sold as HTPC/Media playback cards.
What I wonder is how it fares compared to the passive Radeon 5550 I have. It’s a newer architecture and a little faster on the core clock (and a little lower power), but I wonder how this translates to performance.