Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the idle power consumption.


Given the fact that all HD3870 cards default to 2D clocks when not being used for a 3D application, they are able to exhibit some extremely good efficiency when you are doing non-GPU intensive tasks. We can see this quite well above where the Sapphire Toxic is within 1W of the stock HD3870 card even though it is overclocked.

Then, while under load the gap between stock and overclocked cards increases quite a bit with the Toxic consuming a maximum of 11W more then the reference HD3870. Even with this increase in power consumption, the 55nm core is able to exhibit some impressive numbers even when under high load. In past reviews we have said that the RV670 core is very impressive when it comes to efficiency and we see this again here.