ATI Radeon HD 5830 Review

Power Usage

Power usage is becoming increasingly important in this green age. Most enthusiasts disregard power usage in favour of raw performance but at the other end of the spectrum, budget and mainstream users are more wary.

The entire system drew a total of 331W from the wall, idling with the HD 4870. Under full GPU load, this figure increased to 489W. The HD 5830 demonstrated an expectedly lower power draw with figures of 279W and 484W, for idle and load respectively.

Here is where it gets interesting. The HD 5830 uses far less power when idling and as such brings down the system’s idle power consumption by a significant amount. Under load, it also uses slightly less energy. So we have a situation where we can get more performance along with more power savings. Sounds great to me.

Note:

The major factor for such high wattage is that the 1100W PSU that powers the test system has caused the idle power amount to go up by quite a bit. Hence, this is the reason that knowing the power differential is useful. The differential will also take into account any additional power draw from the CPU also being under load, along with other smaller components, such as hard drive spin-up among others.

As I stated, this is the power draw on the entire system. There are special power meters that can measure the video card power draw at the slot level but for the moment I only have a Kill-A-Watt unit at my disposal.