Power And Efficiency
HydraLogix appears to use more power than CrossFire or SLI, which makes sense since the Hydra 200 is rated at 6 W. Other minor differences between our Lucid and non-Lucid motherboards likely account for remaining power differences.
The power numbers for today’s charts probably look a bit different than those of other articles, because we used a different program to test it. HydraLogix does not support FurMark, but does support 3DMark. So, the latter benchmark’s Perlin Noise test was used to push every GPU to a very high load.
Putting power consumption on a percentage scale allows us to calculate efficiency more easily.
We arrived at our efficiency numbers by dividing average performance by average power used and subtracting “1” from the result. That subtraction takes us from a 100% baseline to a 0% baseline so that only the differences are seen in the charts.
We see that a Radeon HD 5850 is around 10% more efficient at full load than a GeForce GTX 460, but that two GTX 460s are more efficient than two HD 5850s. Skewing the results are things like CPU power and SLI or CrossFire scaling. Because Lucid’s solution only benefited some games, HydraLogix configurations always fall to the bottom.
