AMD's Radeon HD 5000-Series: Measuring Power Efficiency

[Guest]

Most of our graphics card reviews include power measurements at idle and load. But how do applications tax your GPU in between those two extremes? We line up a handful of different programs and monitor power use with a handful of AMD's latest cards.

AMD's Radeon HD 5000-Series: Measuring Power Efficiency : Read more

 

[tony singh]

Very innovative article tom keep it up!! Similar article consisting of various cpus would be really useful.

 

[tacoslave]

gtx 480 and 460 for reference?

 

[Lutfij]

^ nvidia would loose at this battle. period.

 

[spidey81]

I know the FPS/watt wouldn't be as good, but what if the 5670 was crossfired. Would it still be a better alternative, efficiency wise, than say a 5850?

 

[nforce4max]

Remember the R600 (2900xt) has a 80nm core while the 5870 has a 45nm core. Shrink the R600 and you will get the 3870 (55nm) that barely uses hardly any.

 

[rhino13]

And now just for fun we should compare to Fermi.

Oh, wait, this just in:

There is a Fermi comparison chart that was avalible but you needed to have two screens to display the bar graph for Fermi's power consumption and temperature. So the decission was made to provide readers with the single screen only version.

 

[aevm]

I loved this part:

A mere 20 watts separate the Radeon HD 3300, HD 5670, HD 5770, and HD 5870 1 GB. So, in certain cases, the Radeon HD 5870 1 GB can still save enough power to close in on its more mainstream derivatives. Again, this is the case because the cards use a fixed-function video engine to assist in decoding acceleration, which is the same from one board to the next. Thus, even a high-end card behaves like a lower-end product in such a workload. This is very important, as you will see later on.

My next PC will be used mostly for movie DVDs and Diablo 3. Apparently if I get a 5870 1GB I get the best of both worlds - speed in Diablo and low power consumption when playing movies.

How about nVidia cards, would I get the same behavior with a GTX 480 for example?

 

[Onus]

For those not needing the absolute maximum eye candy at high resolutions in their games, the HD5670 looks like a very nice choice for a do-it-all card that won't break the budget.
Next questions: First, where does the HD5750 fall in this? Second, if you do the same kinds of manual tweaking for power saving that you did in your Cool-n-Quiet analysis, how will that change the results? And finally, if you run a F@H client, what does that do to "idle" scores, when the GPU is actually quite busy processing a work unit?

 

[eodeo]

Very interesting article indeed.

I'd love to see nvidia cards and beefier CPUs used as well. Normal non green hdds too. Just how big of a difference in speed/power do they make?

Thank you for sharing.

 

[arnawa_widagda]

Hi guys,

Thanks for reading the article.

Next questions: First, where does the HD5750 fall in this? Second, if you do the same kinds of manual tweaking for power saving that you did in your Cool-n-Quiet analysis, how will that change the results? And finally, if you run a F@H client, what does that do to "idle" scores, when the GPU is actually quite busy processing a work unit?

Have no 5750 sample yet, but they should relatively be close to 5770. For this article, we simply chose the best bin for each series (Redwood, Juniper and Cypress).

The second question, what will happen when you tweak the chip? Glad you ask!! I can't say much yet, but you'll be surprised what the 5870 1 GB can do.

As for NVIDIA cards, I'm hoping to have the chance to test GF100 and derivatives very soon.

Take care.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Thanks for including mainstream applications.

Interesting comments about Furmark.

 

[xbsoft]

>> TEST SYSTEM: AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition (3.2 GHz, >>>>>> 8

 

[mattmock]

It just means you typically will never encounter such an extreme usage scenario.

I have to disagree, there are several ways a user can fully load their graphics card in normal use. I have found that my GPU utilization and fan speed go to %100 when I play the dice mini-game in The Witcher. The game only has to render a small game board and the frame rate goes into the 200-300 range. Some thing similar occurs when I hit the pause key in stalker.

 

[Fokissed]

[citation][nom]xbsoft[/nom](3.2 GHz, >>>>>> 8[/citation]
bad penis joke?

 

[MartenKL]

FPS/watt uses average FPS during the test but max wattage? I am very disappointed by this flawed logic from toms hardware. Spending an entire page describing why everyone else uses flawed testing for benchmarking power efficiency and then doing this simple error is just embarrassing.

 

[MartenKL]

I forgot to say I am very interested in this kind of benchmarks and I am glad Toms Hardware is writing a big piece on it, sorry for the harsh words. For me total Wh per completed task for the entire system is the most interesting number. To me that is the only way to measure efficiency. add to that idle power draw and every user can calculate their own usage (by adding tasks and idle hours). Sorry and thanks yet again for an article with a very important topic. My interest is noise and mechanical wear rather than power cost and environment.

 

[tubers]

Fermi comparison please

 

[mayne92]

What a great article by Tom's (Arnawa)! Probably one of the best articles I have read in a long time! Enjoyed the article because was very detailed and you explained everything so well and I LOVE my tech reviews! A Fermi comparison would have been nice but I know that you said that you don't have them to play with so it's said as a request. Hats off to you Arnawa...for a great read...

 

[eddieroolz]

Really paints in perspective the power of GPUs compared to CPUs. I really wish that one day we'll be able to use the GPU for central processing.

 

[EDIGX2]

Hello everyone
Well i think this article inspired form the movie that AMD has release lately.
That movie called as i think "Mis understanding"here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkyfGJgcwQ
As we all know AMD is innovative in power consumption as well It's Graphics I read such this review in Anandtech.com ...Just WOW....Loads Of Noise and power flowed for Fermi VGAs . In this review we see the smooth performance for 5670 and 5770.
and another thing that we should give a hint on is You know releasing Fermi after six month of releasing 5000 series...I think it's good in performance but not after 6 Months!!! but awful in power consuming and noise and heat!!
Take care guys

 

[neiroatopelcc]

I am shocked by just how much drivers affect power consumption!
Yesterday I added another graphics card to my system, and the catalyst driver freaked out. The result was a 488W power draw while bluescreening (10.7 driver crashing and causing the debug screen. No driver power savings enabled), and more than 450W power draw while in windows with a broken 10.8 driver.
Reverting to 10.6 resulted in a power draw of 'just' 491W with two monitors and a beamer enabled, and world of warcraft running. In other words, with driver power management working, you achieve lower power draw while gaming than you do in idle without it.

 

[Guest]

When testing Radeons it should be interesting to add Avivo Video Converter as another testing tool.

 

[anthonys17]

Enjoyed the article! Power Efficiency is an important factor for me Great!

 

[wellsoul2]

"Here's the kicker. Since GPU-based performance is practically the same with most discrete graphics cards, the board with the lowest (peak) power consumption is the one you want to get for Photoshop. Of the graphics tested in this article, our winner is AMD’s Radeon HD 5670. The card manages to eat up an additional 14 W on top of the base system’s power consumption."

Or just use the onboard Radeon 3300 and save the price of the 5670.
(If power consumption is the big deal)
Seriously..buy the 5770 if you want to play games. Bang/Buck it's better
and only 20W more than the 5670.