Gaming benchmarks and power-draw observations
Moving on over to gaming, we test at a card-busting 2,560x1,600 with all the bells and whistles turned on.
Putting the performance into proper context, the figures from the 3XS Cyclone are the best we've seen from a single-GPU card. Feel free to compare them against a bevy of others right over here.
Power-draw
Evaluated from the mains and adjudged by as a system, the power-draw numbers can be considered average. Radeon cards tend to idle with less juice, and looking at the loaded power consumption (power-draw when gaming), we see that the single-GPU GTX 480 system consumes about the same number of watts.
We also ran an extreme power-draw test by having Prime95 span seven CPU 'cores' together with FurMark running the built-in GPU stability test. At-mains power consumption averaged around 660W over a five-minute period.
Understanding that greater input power is needed to counter the inevitable loss during AC-DC conversion, Scan cuts it fairly close with a 650W PSU, and there's no scope of adding a second card at a later date without changing the PSU. This problem is easily solved by choosing an 850W supply instead, adding £37.81 to the total.
