X-bit labs

Power Consumption of Contemporary Graphics Accelerators. Part II: NVIDIA vs. ATI (page 7)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 08/22/2004 | 12:11 PM ]

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is the fastest GPU originally developed for the use in mainstream graphics cards. Now that the GeForce 6 series has arrived, products on the GeForce FX 5900/5950 begin to move down into the middle class, pushing the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra lower still. After there appears the GeForce 6600 GPU, the new mainstream graphics processor, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra will become obsolete.

I took a Tornado GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics card from Inno3D for my tests:

The graphics card follows the reference design and only differs from the etalon in the shape and color of the plate that covers the cooler. Again, this product features the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU and has 128MB of DDR2 memory. The nominal frequencies of the GPU and memory in the 3D mode are 475/900MHz. The card was average at overclocking, notching 530/1000MHz.

Here are the results of my measuring the power consumption of this card:

You shouldn’t wonder at the high power consumption of this mainstream graphics card. A greater part of the total falls on the graphics memory, rather than the GPU, since this product uses DDR2 memory chips, notorious for their voracity. High power consumption and heat dissipation were among the factors that made DDR2 soon give way to power-frugal GDDR3 chips. For example, the GeForce 6800-based graphics card with GDDR3 memory has a smaller power consumption than the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, both in the Idle and Burn modes, although it’s rather stupid to compare the performance of the two.

The detailed picture follows:

There are no oddities here. The +12v power line that goes through the additional power connector takes the biggest load; in the Burn mode, the current is 2.11amp in this line.