ATI Radeon HD 5500 Series GDDR5 Review

Name: ATI Radeon HD 5500 Series GDDR5 Review - Page 10
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 31, 2010, 01:00 PM EDT

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while 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 graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

All three of the cards tested here consume relatively little power. None of them require a supplemental power connector and can be fed completely by the PEG slot they are plugged into. As you can see, the GeForce GT 240 consumed the least amount of power while idling while the Radeon HD 5550 used the least under load, but all three of the card were within a few watts of each other. And all of the cards run so cool and quiet as to be a non-issue.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Gaming, graphics, GPU, GDDR5, dx11, DirectX 11, Eyefinity

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com