Product Listing

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB (R600)

By Vincent Chang - 14 May 2007

Temperature Testing & Power Consumption

Temperature Testing & Power Consumption

With the Radeon HD 2900 XT almost completely sealed by its gigantic cooler, it was not the easiest task to get the temperatures for this card, especially the covered components like the core and memory modules. As our usual 3DMark03 benchmark did not work properly, we had to run the Firefly Forest segment in 3DMark06 to tax the graphics card during our temperature testing. Given that the other cards in this comparison were based on 3DMark03, there could be discrepancies in the results here. Hence, you should take this as a reference and also remember that there are utilities that report the core temperatures onboard and these generally will give higher temperatures than our probe.

Looking at our results, the Radeon HD 2900 XT did not seem that warm when compared to its rivals. At its worst, you can expect it to be around the temperature of ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX. Generally, while these numbers may not look promising, these high-end cards have quite high tolerance for heat and temperatures of more than 80 degrees should not affect its performance.

Power Consumption

Predictably, this giant card rated at 215W had the highest power consumption numbers, scoring 247W on our meter. Of course, this was the overall power draw from the entire system but it was still slightly higher than the faster GeForce 8800 Ultra. In terms of power efficiency, it's hard to see where ATI can compete with NVIDIA's solution at the moment. The 65nm die shrink is definitely crucial to ATI's hopes in the mobile and desktop graphics arena.

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