Newer drivers reduce high end ATi GPU power consumption
Got a high end Radeon that’s chewing through your electricity? Want to save a few dollars on that electric bill? The new Catalyst 6.1 drivers from ATi which employ power saving features borrowed from ATi’s mobile product line may help. Strangely enough, no mention of this was found in the official Catalyst 6.1 release notes.
Newer ATi BIOS updates also add additional power saving functionality.
ATI Technologies said Friday it had employed technologies originally designed to reduce energy consumption of graphics processors for notebooks to trim power hunger of high-end desktop graphics cards, such as Radeon X1800 or more advanced.
When X-bit labs originally measured power consumption of high-end Radeon X1800 XT graphics card back in September, 2005, it was about 112W under maximum recently, the absolute maximum for that time. However, when the measurements were carried out later, the power consumption dropped to slightly below 103W on the same graphics card with the same BIOS version, but on a newer driver.
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