Power Consumption, Temperatures, Noise and Cost

One time ago power consumption was never seen as a big issue in terms of computing; however, more recently manufacturers have been trying to reduce the amount of power consumed by components. Easy you say? Well in a world where technology is suppose to be made better, faster and smaller, it’s not quite as simple as adding an extra few buses or speeding up processing time. Instead, manufacturers are looking at ways of improving technology whilst still lowering power usage and temperatures.

Although the 4850 is a better graphics card than the 4770 and so you would assume it uses less power anyway, it would still be interesting to see just how much less power it uses as the result of the 40mn chip used in the HIS 4770.

Also, you’ve got to consider that the Sapphire Vapor-X 4850 uses a much larger heatsink than the 4770’s, so when comparing these results, its temperatures are very likely to be less anyway.

Power Consumption

*Please note that the power consumption results above are for our WHOLE test system – not just the graphics card.

Although the 4770 actually uses MORE power than the 4850 at idle (12 watts more), at load it uses 25 watts less. Although we would expect it to use slightly less at both idle and load, 25 watts difference is more than I was expecting – that’s the amount of power needed to power another hard drive.

So it seems it’s still early days for the 40mn chip. Although it does use hardly any power, it would’ve been more satisfying to see it use less at idle than a card which is actually more powerful.

Temperatures

The temperature results correlate greatly with the power consumption results. Once again, at idle, the 4850 was actually running cooler than the 4770 – 5 degrees cooler. However, at load, the 4770 scored 3 degrees less. But in all honestly, the cooler that was mounted to the 4850 was much larger than the stock cooler on the HIS 4770 so this test is somewhat unfair to an extent.

Noise

At stock controlled RPM the GPU Cooler mounted to the HIS 4770 was indeed very quiet and kept the GPU running cool. When overclocking was carried out we wacked the fan speed up to full belt. At this speed setting it was, unpredictably, much louder. However, it was nowhere near as loud as I would have thought and I was actually happy leaving it at this speed permanently.

Cost

Costing around £70 the HIS Radeon 4770 is a great budget card. It comes in at £20 under the 4850 and boasts similar performance as shown from the benchmarks.