ATI Radeon HD 5450 & HD 5570 Review
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.
Both cards lost to the more expensive 9800GT but beat the cheaper 8500GT. While synthetic benchmarks do give a good idea of overall performance, they don’t usually tell the whole story. To do that we need to run some real-world game benches.
The 5570 consumes 69 watts more power under load and 40 watts more in idle? No way, something must have gone wrong here. The results on other sites are in a different league – single digit watt difference in idle and ~30 watts under load.
Thanks for your comment Howitzer. The fact is exactly as I stated, this is the power draw on the *entire* system. Other sites may have the tools such as power meters that can measure the video card power draw at the slot level. I am only privy to a Kill-A-Watt unit.
The major factor in this is that the 1100W PSU that powers my system has driven up the idle power load quite a bit. Now the difference in the figures will also take into account any additional power draw from the CPU also being under load along with other smaller components like hard drive(s) spinning up and so on.
We do hope to continue improving our testing with better equipment, as our very limited resources will allow.
Thanks for your time. =)