ATI Radeon HD 4550 Budget DX10.1 GPU
We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.
|
|
|
The Radeon HD 4550 proved to be quite power friendly. The Radeon HD 4550 has the lowest idle and peak power consumption of all of the Radeons. A couple of the GeForce cards had lower idle power consumption, but only the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB DDR2 had lower peak consumption.
We normally talk about noise output in this section of of video cards articles as well, but because the Radeon HD 4550 we tested was passively cooled, it generated absolutely no noise. In case you're wondering, heat wasn't a concern either. Throughout all of our testing, the heatsink on the card got warm to the touch, but it was never hot enough to cause concern.
