Today we are using a Keithley Integra Model 2700/E and we are measuring power consumption at VGA card inputs, not full system drain. To test load we first fire up Resident Evil at high image quality settings then we follow up with the synthetic Furmark which loads the GPU beyond game engine levels … Furmark is not a particularly realistic reading, but its interesting to document.
This result is particularly interesting – the HIS HD5550 is an extremely efficient card and has outperformed the Sapphire Ultimate model when under load in both real world and synthetic situations, even if only by a few watts. ATI claim 10watts at idle but our device measured 12 watts, same as the Asus card.