Power consumption
Power consumption is evaluated when the system is idling, running Call of Duty: Black Ops (peak number noted here) and when being battered by FurMark. The GeForce GTX 580 runs v1.7.0 of the stress-testing app.
Nothing to choose between the mid-range cards when idling.
But play a real game for 10 minutes and the differences appear. ASUS' HD 6850 DirectCu is the most power-frugal of the lot, coming in over 10W below the other two pre-overclocked HD 6850s.
We've compared the Radeons' performance against the GTX 460 SOC thus far and they've been left trailing by a small margin. The payback here is that power consumption is significantly lower for AMD cards.
A fact rather graphically mirrored in the intensive FurMark test.
