Radeon X1800 GTO preview - Page 4

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/09/2006 09:00 AM [ ] 0 comment(s)

Excuse Me, but Watt Did You Say?

With the ongoing trend in an increased power consumption of computer hardware (and this is really worrying) we will check a statement that ATI made about power consumption to us regarding the X1000 family of graphics cards.

As always we simply look at the Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify those claims. What we do what we always do with new graphics' cards, we monitor the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall consumption of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. I understand it's not the most reliable method, but it's a darn good indication!

In 3DMark05 the AMD Athlon FX-57, 2 GB, DVD-rom, NFORCE4 based test platform shows a maximum peak use of ~220 Watts for the Radeon X1800 GTO. And that's a perfectly fine score. Let's have a look at my findings:

Graphics card	100% load	System Idle
X1300 XT	193	133
X1600 XT	211	140
X1800 GTO	220	138
X1800 XL	229	155
X1800 XT	273	160
X1900 XTX	290	165

* Results in Watt

Overall I recommend a standard 400 Watts power supply at the very least. Also make sure that the PSU has at least 18 Amps on the 12 volts rail. It should be sufficient.

How hot are these millions of transistors running ??

Oh it's warm underneath that single slot hood, but the temperature remains well within the safety margins. The standard reference cooling design works really efficiently. It's the same cooling design you know from the X1800 XL.

We always test at an ambient room temperature of 21 Degrees C. At idle, normal operation expect roughly ~45 Degrees C, which is fine. At 100% graphics core utilization we measured a maximum ~75 Degrees C peak temperature. That's quite a lot yet it's the norm these days.

Two years ago I would have freaked out.

Noise Levels - dB what ??

Nauseating; the noise that PC's these days produce. The only way that will change that is if we all pay attention to it.

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bough a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask ? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.

TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS
Jet takeoff (200 feet)	120 dBA
Construction Site	110 dBA	Intolerable
Shout (5 feet)	100 dBA
Heavy truck (50 feet)	90 dBA	Very noisy
Urban street	80 dBA
Automobile interior	70 dBA	Noisy
Normal conversation (3 feet)	60 dBA
Office, classroom	50 dBA	Moderate - X1800 GTO
Living room	40 dBA
Bedroom at night	30 dBA	Quiet
Broadcast studio	20 dBA
Rustling leaves	10 dBA	Barely audible

We startup a benchmark and leave it running for a while. The fan starts to rotate faster and makes a moderate noise. We take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card.

We measure roughly ~52 dBa making a lot of noise once the graphics core is getting hotter. which is to be considered a quiet to moderate noise level coming from the PC yet also a norm as most of our tests setups at this sound level.

Again, this is a very subjective test and that dBa level includes all noise in the environment.

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