HardwareZone Iron Tech 2008 - The Grand Finale!

Power Consumption Test

Power Consumption Test

With the important performance segment completed, there was one last twist in the competition. This was the power consumption testing, which aimed to find out which system had the lowest power draw when running at full load. The contestant with the system that had the lowest power draw would get 100 points and so on, descending down to 10 points for the most power hungry system.

To fully stress the system, Furmark, a rendering benchmark and a media encoding test were running simultaneously. The peak wattage number was then taken at a similar point in the benchmark progress and used in the competition.

Since this segment contributed 30% of the final score, all the competitors were obviously concerned about how their rigs fared, especially since even a 1W difference could mean a position in the rankings and 10 points.

From the way the results turned out, it seemed that those who chose the ATI Radeon HD 4850 generally had lower power consumption figures than those who selected the GeForce 9800GTX+. This was expected given the lower TDP rating of the ATI graphics card but with only 30% of the final score for this segment, would it make any difference in the final reckoning? We'll know soon enough.