which option uses more power...?

[wol-va-rine]

1. a 4850x2...or...
2. a 4870 and 4850 in mixed crossfire...

I am thinking about giving someone my 4870 (512MB) + $100 for a BNIB 4850x2 "IF" the power consumption would be less with the one card...

thoughts...?

 

[GotNoRice]

Yeah I'd say the power consumption will be lower with the one card, but probably not by much.

Also, iirc the 4850x2 cards all had 2GB Ram (1GB per GPU) which would be pretty significantly better than what would basically be 4850 crossfire using two 512mb GPUs. If anything that is the reason you should do it. Then you can pick up another 4850x2 later

 

[wol-va-rine]

Yeah I'd say the power consumption will be lower with the one card, but probably not by much.

Also, iirc the 4850x2 cards all had 2GB Ram (1GB per GPU) which would be pretty significantly better than what would basically be 4850 crossfire using two 512mb GPUs. If anything that is the reason you should do it. Then you can pick up another 4850x2 later

thanks...

 

[WBurchnall]

I used to have a ATI Radeon HD4850x2. It consumed 158W at idle & 325W at peak load roughly afair. I checked google and it seems to agree with my recollection.

I remember it was touted as having pretty good power consumption as a single ATI Radeon HD 4580 uses 131 watts idle/251 watts under load and an ATI Radeon HD 4870 uses 153 idle/283 load according to tom's hardware which is a semi-unrealiable source.

If you look at xbitlab's article here, it has substantially different numbers for the 4780/4850 but agrees with the 4850x2 estimate:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/sapphire-hd4850x2_8.html#sect0