NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI versus ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFire

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 1.8.2 at 1920×1200 resolution.

Power Consumption Results: When it comes to power consumption the ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFire configuration uses slightly less power but, as you can see, the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI setup doesn’t use that much more. We are talking about just 5 Watts higher at full load and 2 Watts higher at idle. We’ll consider this one a draw.