7 - Power consumption| Test Suite

Power consumption

Alright then, let's focus on something else and monitor power consumption. What you need to understand is that you are dealing with a very power hungry system. Especially with Crossfire, two cards require double to amount of power.

Typically in an idle situation an Intel based PC with one GPU should hover at 150 to 170 Watt power consumption. The culprit here is the second 4870. Once you really start to stress the PC and take the two graphics adapters into account in combination with 4 active CPU cores, the numbers will jump up massively.

This behavior is not special to this system, it's typical for any PC with specifications like these. So with the PC in idle your power consumptions will top 250 Watts and during gaming it can peak close to 500 Watts power consumption. A lot for sure, but Smooth creations inserted a fine power supply to be able to deal with it.

Hardware and Software Used

Now we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.

Mainboard

Foxconn P45-S
ECS Intel X48

Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.00 GHz / 1333 FSB
Intel Core 2 Quad QX9650 3.00 GHz / 1333 FSB

Graphics Cards

Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD 4870 Crossfire

Memory

G.Skill DDR2 2x2GB CAS4
2048 MB (2x1024MB) DDR2 CAS4

Power Supply Unit

CoolerMaster 1000W
Enermax Galaxy 1000 Watt (DXX PCIe 2.0 model)

Monitor

Dell 3007WFP - up-to 2560x1600

OS related Software

Windows Vista 32-bit
DirectX 9/10 End User Runtime
Catalyst 8.8

Software benchmark suite

Sandra
Everest
3DMark Vantage
PC Mark Vantage
Internal created tests
Call of Duty 4
F.E.A.R.
Mass Effect
Devil may Cry 4

A word about "FPS"
What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.

A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a time demo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and its gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

• So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS, then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
• With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
• When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
• Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER graphics card or a very old game.