Heat & Acoustics / Power Consumption
For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.
The results of this test were nothing short of stunning with the Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic returning some amazing results. The Vapor-X cooler knocked off nearly 30C from the reference design’s maximum temperatures while being near-silent in its operation. We couldn’t have asked for a better result than this when it comes to air cooling.
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. We have also included several other tests as well. 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.
As expected, higher clock speeds do tend to translate into increased power consumption. However, we aren’t looking at anything extreme here with a mere 18W separating the reference clocked card and the overclocked Sapphire Toxic model. Even with this card’s performance it still doesn’t consume as much power as a GTX 260 216 which should be proof enough of ATI’s success with the 40nm manufacturing process.
Heat & Acoustics
For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.
The results of this test were nothing short of stunning with the Sapphire HD 5850 Toxic returning some amazing results. The Vapor-X cooler knocked off nearly 30C from the reference design’s maximum temperatures while being near-silent in its operation. We couldn’t have asked for a better result than this when it comes to air cooling.
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. We have also included several other tests as well. 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.
As expected, higher clock speeds do tend to translate into increased power consumption. However, we aren’t looking at anything extreme here with a mere 18W separating the reference clocked card and the overclocked Sapphire Toxic model. Even with this card’s performance it still doesn’t consume as much power as a GTX 260 216 which should be proof enough of ATI’s success with the 40nm manufacturing process.
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