Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
GPGPU Power Consumption Results
Power Consumption: GPGPU Stress Test
We'll take one step further and push the Gigabyte R9 285 WindForce OC as far as it will go. The resulting 191 W (without changing the power target) are right around where AMD’s TDP said the card would max out. This also shows that the manufacturer’s specifications can generally be trusted, especially since increasing the clock frequency doesn’t change the power draw as long as the other settings are kept the same.
And now lets focus on a perfect minute’s worth of gently smoothed curve.
The measurements at the motherboard slot confirm, once again, that all of the power values we saw fell well within the acceptable range.
Let’s take a look at the individual measurements again in our table.
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Minimum | Maximum | Average |
|---|---|---|---|
| PCIe 12V | 57 W | 175 W | 140 W |
| Motherboard 3.3V | 3 W | 6 W | 5 W |
| Motherboard 12V | 19 W | 83 W | 47 W |
| Graphics Card Total | 87 W | 250 W | 191 W |
List of All Individual Values per Supply Line
Once again, the following gallery shows all power consumption values for each supply line.
Voltages
The average voltage is 11.9 V. Those fluctuations we saw are making an appearance yet again.
The 191 W torture test result is almost the exact TDP as stated by the manufacturer. In light of the higher computing power requirements of OpenCL and DirectCompute, the Gigabyte R9 285 WindForce OC’s performance yield is higher than that of a comparable Kepler-based GeForce graphics card in places. Still, we’re talking about catching up to the competition from an efficiency perspective, not surpassing it. Tonga will probably have trouble going up against Maxwell.
