Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2G GDDR3

Name: Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2G GDDR3 - Page 10
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 11:15 AM EDT

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.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 falls right about where you'd expect it to in terms of power consumption, considering its performance and the fact that it's powered by a pair of GPUs and 2GB of memory. While idling, it's right about on par with the more powerful Radeon HD 4870 X2, but under load the 4850 X2 consumes considerably less power than its big brother. Overall, the Radeon HD 4850 X2's power consumption is marginally higher than its NVIDIA-based counterparts, but lower than AMD's more powerful flagship.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Sapphire, 4800 series, X2

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