Real Power Consumption - 4870 X2 & GTX295 out of Spec!

[Kylian]

After many days of registration-process, i finally got it to post here . Firstly i want to say, that due to the many request of non-german-readers, we decided to translate our article on graphics card power consumption into english. I think this will be interessting for some people here:

Power consumption of current graphic cards (English Version)

At this point i don´t want to go to deep into the discussion about FurMark. I think our viewpoint get´s pretty clear if you read the whole linked article. We know about the fact, that FurMark is a worst-case-scenario, but we treat the tool also as such (you´ll get what i mean, if you read the article).

Perhaps their clamp meter wasn't calibrated or not calibrated properly. Actually it makes me wonder if they were using an AC (incorrect) or DC (correct) or dual mode clamp meter and how they converted the reading (mA or A) into Watts. That would explain the extremely high readings they received from the PCI-E power cable.

Sorry, but that's not the proper way to go about things. I can´t blame you for not reading our test methods, because you propably don´t understand german language (Now you can, because we translated it ). But nevertheless throwing arround assumptions without any justifaction that are simply not true just to make our results to look wrong isn´t the nice way . Just as editor yourself (i assume your writing for Hardware Cannucks) you should know, that such a behaviour can be really frustrating for an author.

Quote from our article, that hopefully will clarify things:

The Temna-device is a True-RMS-clamp-meter. This is necessary because the graphics card isn´t purely ohmic but a reactance with transients. This current clamp was calibrated using a Fluke 9100 Universal Calibration System (Standard calibration like described in DIN EN ISO 9000 / 9001 referring to DIN EN ISO/ IEC 17025 (ISO Guide 25). Measuring Tolerance: up to 30A: +-0,08% +2mA, up to 105A: +-0,08% +11mA.

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/power_c...ics/index5.php
You see, our meassuring-devices are calibrated well. And as you can even see in the picture, we used the DC-Mode of our current-clamp.

i dont know, those numbers dont make sense... compare them to whole system power consumption meassurements of several other sites and youll see it doesnt add up...
those numbers are too high, i find it hard to believe them... they must have gotten something wrong...

One more time, our load-results are that high because we used FurMark as load. Have look at this comparison of tools. As you can see FurMark is much more demanding than 3DMark06. I think these 3DMark06-results should be pretty much what you expected, right? But you can also see, that there are many games that are more demanding than 3DMark06, not only FurMark.

as interesting as this article is, its irrelevant if they do anything that 90% of the population woulnt do, but honestly since this is XS, it is pretty cool to see such high power consumption. now id like to see how hot the parts get, anyone got a thermal camera?

We have one :P.
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2008/messtechnik/index8.php
And we are currently working on an separat article that will deal with the temperatures of the 4870 (and the high voltage regulator temperature). And yes, we´ll do some pictures with our thermal camera .

Greetings,
Leander [HT4U]