Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition review

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.

Unfortunately we didn't have a reference HD5550 solution to compare against but we were impressed with the results from our power tests. The HD5550 is consuming a little more power at idle when compared to the GT220 but when under load the efficiency of the core comes into play. 29 watts when gaming is really quite an incredible result. We weren't able to mirror ATI's reference results of 10watts at idle as we recorded 15watts from the Sapphire solution.

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