Power Consumption

Here we are going to discuss the measured power consumption level of complete systems (without the monitor) equipped with different professional graphics accelerators. The measurements were taken in idle mode and under workload - in 3dsmax-04 test from the SPECViewperf 10 suite.

The results are quite logical. The systems equipped with high-performance professional graphics accelerators based on 80nm chips require most power. That is why the top ATI FireGL solutions will hardly be the best choice for power-conscious users. Quadro FX 3700 demonstrated pretty attractive balance between performance and power consumption. However, it is the newest card among all our today’s testing participants: it is based on a 65nm chip.

The power consumption of ATI FireGL V5600 and V3600 turned out higher than that of Quadro FX 1700 and FX 570, although these AMD products use GPUs manufactured with more advanced production process. However the youngest Nvidia graphics cards are also slower than their rivals, since their clock speeds are lower to begin with.