Graphics Card Power Consumption Article

[Fulmar]

Found this on at Tomshardware.  Compares Graphics cards made over the last 3 years or so and what their idle and 100% usage power demands are.  I found it interesting - but a side note that the first chart (from socket) was tested by calculating the wattage drawn from the card measured at the wall socket, so there would naturally be some power inefficiencies there.  But they later on and calculate in the Power Effeciency of the PSU's they used to get a more realistic number of the actual watts and amps used.  (Actual Consumption in Watts = Measurement at Socket in Watts x efficiency of power supply)

Let’s take the Radeon HD 4870 as an example. AMD states “500 watt power supply” as a requirement on the packaging. According to the actual measurements, though, the graphics card doesn’t need more than 150 watts even under full load. Now we’ll calculate in 150 watts for the CPU, motherboard and drives, 300 watts should be enough. If we assume from this a 300 watt load on the 12 V line, this means 25 A is required for this rail.

Cheap power supply 500 watts with 17 A on the 12V line.

As you can see from the stated power rating, you can very quickly run into trouble with this 500-watt power supply, because despite the 500 W figure, it only provides 17 A on the 12 V line—at least 20 A to 25 A is necessary for a current standard PC with the HD 4870. So even if AMD sets 500 watts as a requirement, you can not assume all cheap power supplies will suffice based solely on this parameter.

With current brand name power supplies, things are different: pretty much every 500-watt brand name power supply will provide 25 A on the 12 V line. Even older brand name power supplies with fewer watts achieve the required targets.

Main Article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-radeon-power,2122.html

Charts for Nvidia and ATI: (from socket)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-radeon-power,2122-4.html

Charts for Nvidia and ATI: (actual)
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-radeon-power,2122-6.html

[Fulmar]

Whoops wrong forum - please move to Hardware/Softwarre please!

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[crazyivan]

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