Testing (continued):
Power Consumption:
The final test was to monitor the total system power consumption with each of the graphics card configurations installed. A Seasonic Power Angel power monitoring device was plugged in between the power supply and the wall outlet, and the wattage screen was monitored. Since all other hardware remained the same, any change in this value would be the result of the video card's demands. Idle conditions were established by letting the system sit at the Windows desktop until a stable reading was achieved, and for load testing the Devil May Cry benchmark was executed.
While I would not call the HD4850 X2 energy efficient, the results weren't as bad as I expected. The total surged past 300W (hitting a maximum of 311W), which is exactly the same amount as the pair of Toxic HD3870 cards.
Overclocking:
Overclocking a Radeon card can be rather easy if you are only interested in using the options available on the Catalyst Control Center's Overdrive tab. The sliders allowed for a maximum of 700MHz on the GPU cores (about a 12% increase over stock speed) and a maximum of 1200MHz on the memory (about a 21% increase over stock speed). I maxed the settings out, did some stability testing, and when everything checked out I moved on to one more round of 3DMark Vantage. The chart below shows that there wasn't much room for improvement, as the GPU score went up by just under 5%, while the total score went up by just under 3%.
