Sapphire Radeon R9 380X Nitro Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Power Consumption

Sapphire Radeon R9 380X Nitro OC Video Card

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 ran Battlefield 4 at 1920×1080 and recorded the average idle reading and the peak gaming reading on the power meter.

power-consumption

Power Consumption Results: The system with the Sapphire Radeon R9 380X Nitro 4GB video card used 104 Watts at idle when the system first starts, but as the card heats up the fans kick on and the power consumption level increased and then remained at 112 Watts. At full load while gaming the system was pulling 351 Watts from the wall, which is actually a bit higher than we expected from this card as AMD says that it has a typical board power of 190W. AMD hasn’t been winning the power battle for mainstream desktop cards in years and that is still true here at the end of 2015.