Scotty, We Need More Power! - Power Consumption
As the requirements for computational horsepower go up, so does the need for electrical power. ATI added 20% more silicon to this graphics processor, so the question we will ask (and answer) in this section is: "How much does the overall power consumption increase with the additional silicon?"
ATI has made leaps and bounds in the power department. X1800XT Crossfire consumed more peak power than the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512 SLI configuration. Below are the idle and boot power consumption figures; as you can see, both systems draw about the same amount of power when there aren't cards present. That being said, ATI is able to use less power and do more. The benchmark results will show that ATI won 19 of the 28 tests, while NVIDIA won the other 9.
