Laptop-Review.eu

Noise/power consumption

Noise:
The card does not make much noise at idle in Windows, and is pretty silent under the benchmark tests as well. However, just to give you an idea of how loud the card can be when the fan runs at 100%, you can hear it in action in this youtube video.

See the clip here

Power consumption:
For the power test we used a small flow meter which measures the overall watt consumption of the computer. The test setup is a very hungry Core i7 system, and is most likely not what you would use if you cared about your PC power consumption.

However, one of the most important features of the HD5800 series is the low power consumption. The HD5870 card uses only 27 watt when idle, which is very low for a high-end GPU, and according to ATi it has a TPD (thermal power design) of 188 watt. The HD4770 is unfortunately not included in the graph as it for some reason refused be stable in Windows. It later proved to be an issue with the new Catalyst 9.12 driver.
But let us see what the power consumption looks like.



The idle watt consumption without overclock is very decent, and the consumption at load is not all that high either. You can clearly see the watt consumption rise dramatically when the card is overclocked, however.
We have reached the end of our test, so let us jump to the conclusion and translate all those benchmark scores into words so we can give this graphics card a rating.