Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic 1GB Video Card Review

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged
it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system
to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load
numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running
the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.7.0 at 1920×1200 resolution.

Power Consumption Results: The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB Toxic graphics card uses slightly more power at both idle and load over a reference Radeon HD 5850. This makes sense as the voltages on the card are higher to aid in the higher clock frequencies. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB Toxic graphics card performs close to a Radeon HD 5870, but as you can tell it uses ~12% less power at full load since it has fewer stream processors.