ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire
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We have a few final data points to cover before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter, and also took some notes regarding their noise output. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used and to explain how loud the configurations were under load. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption here, not just the power being drawn by the video cards alone.
Due to the Radeon X1950 Pro's relatively modest clock speeds and the fact that the GPU is manufactured at 80nm, as opposed to the R580's 90nm, power consumption is relatively low. While idling the Radeon X1950 Pro drew 4 fewer watts than an X1950 XTX, and under load it was the most power-friendly card by far with a peak of around 212 watts. We also tested the card while running in a CrossFire configuration and found that in that setup they drew 148 watts while idling, and 302 watts under load.
These relative low power consumption numbers translated into fairly low operating temperatures as well. During our testing, we observed idle core GPU temperatures that hovered around 39'C and peak GPU temperatures under load of around 68'C.
The cooler used on the Radeon X1950 Pro was also fairly quiet. Throughout our testing, the card's fan was never audible over the background noise generated by the PSU, CPU cooler and hard drives.
