Heat & Noise

Overall, heat was very much under control throughout testing and even through the most strenuous test we could put it through the temperatures never rose above 82C since the fan would immediately spin up. By spinning up we mean very fractionally increasing speed to a point where it was just above a whisper.

That being said, while the new Nvidia cards have the acoustical profile of a freight train coming straight at you, this card is dead silent. To tell you the truth, at first it looked to us like the HD4870 was equipped with that dreaded piece of acoustical engineering which was the fan on the HD2900XT. Luckily, this card proved again and again that it could stay extremely quiet even under sustained loads of over an hour.

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 peak idle power consumption.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Power consumption proved to be a bit of a mixed bag since for the performance we are getting, the system draw is not that bad at all. However, we were hoping for a bit less wattage being used when the card is at idle. As we have seen in the past, the GTX 280 has a very good clock speed and voltage controller with which it can get some amazingly low idle power figures. We were hoping that ATI’s PowerPlay would achieve the same thing but at this point it seems to be poorly implemented or not working at all. We hope that this situation can be rectified in the near future with a driver release.