Real world power consumption measurements from triple 7970's

Hi,
Now my water cooled rig is up running and stable, I thought I would offer some info I have recorded thats kind of interesting.

During benching and gaming, I have been creating a spreadsheet of everything I do and that includes power draw at the mains outlet. I was very surprised to find that most games dont stress the PSU anything like benchmarking. I thought the figures would be much closer.

The Test Rig: (For power consumption reference)

• ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z
• i7 2600K @ Std settings
• 3x AMD 7970HD in Tri-Fire @ std settings
• 2x 240GB OCZ SSD's
• 3x 1TB Velociraptors
• Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 @ 1866
• XFX 1250W PSU
• 1260 & 360 Radiators fed with D5 pump
• A few lovely lights... lol

Results as follows:
(All settings maxed for each game, using eyefinity at 5760x1200)


Benchmarking:

• 3D Mark 11 (Performance) – 880w
• Heaven 2.5 – 898w
• 3D Mark Vantage (Performance) – 906w
• Furmark on 3 screens – 908w
• Aida 64 stability test - 1092w

Gaming:

• Mass Effect 3 - 565w
• Shift 2 unleashed – 570w
• Syndicate – 580w
• Skyrim – 620w
• Hawx 2 – 641w
• Alan wake – 720w
• Crysis 2 – 780w

There is little point to this topic, other than to show that during gaming, your PSU may not be quite as stressed as you think. Its during benchmarking that you need the extra watts for synthetic loads.

Please Note:
These figures were taken with everything at standard clocks so its a valid benchmark. Overclocking will increase the current required.

Eye opening for me. I was expecting more watts while gaming.

Stewart@MSD said:

Crysis 2 – 780w

Click to expand...

It sometimes amazes me how much juice our modern machines use. That's over one horsepower to play Crysis, mostly just carrying the losses associated with switching billions of nanoscale transistors.

no bf3 ?

Little update for you as it may be of use to someone...



The XFX 1250W pro that advertises itself as single rail and makes a huge song and dance about it is in fact NOT! Its Multi rail... They blatently LIE!



After being annoyed for a year with random shutdowns, I discovered this with a little help from a chap over on OCN and he sent me some links where it is dissasembled and proved, so after a bit of reconfiguring of my rail distribution I solved the problem, but I am still pretty damn annoyed!



Anyway... Pushed the system further now and got the following peak readings when benching 3DMark Fire Strike and thought folk may be interested in similar figures for a pretty heavily overclocked rig. (Same system but now on a 3770K)



1GPU -




2x GPU -




3x GPU -




Remember - these figures are at the wall and dont take into account the PSU conversion efficiency... but its still time for me to upgrade. Max Revo time.

Great to see, i do think i will be cutting it VERY close with an AX750 with my setup, plus 9 or more fans, overclocking and such. But great to see.