Why is it so hard to find out power consumption for video cards? True, with some googling I found this very helpful compiled canonical list:
http://archive.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354
But loads of independent web sites had to do the testing and then this guy helpfully compiled the information.
Why don't manufacturers make this information available, on the packaging, or at least on their websites? It's pretty crucial these days when building a system, people are forever asking about it. And, not to get into the AGW argument that belongs in the politics forum, but some of us are concerned about our electric bills. Perhaps if the information was made clearer there'd be a slight brake on the tendency of cards to become ever-more power hungry?
I almost think there should be an obligation to provide certain standard information like this (and core and memory clock speeds, memory chip timings, memory bus width etc) on all cards' packaging, just as food manufacturers provide calorie, fat, salt etc information. But I reluctantly admit the technology used is probably too variable for that proposal to make sense (people could argue that these stats don't always mean the same thing or might have no meaning at all in some cases).
Why it would be nice if this were possible is it could stop tricky behavior like prominently listing the RAMDAC speed but saying nothing about the much more important issue of memory speed (perhaps in the hope people might confuse the two?) or listing useless checkbox features like AGPx8 (back when it made no difference to performance) while hiding the fact that the memory bus width is half the size of the normal card, as was the case on all those 'Special Edition' OEM cards. Likewise it would be nice to know the memory used without having to rely on some review site removing the heatsinks and having a look.
As it stands manufacturers partly compete to take advantage of people's ignorance about things like memory bus width, and suffer market pressure to add useless features and ignore important ones. If such things were all listed in a standard way would there not be more competition on the features that really mattered?
I was looking for an 2nd hand older, lower power, card for an older PC recently and, Lord, the amount of googling needed to work out what the actual stats of any given card were likely to be.
http://archive.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354
But loads of independent web sites had to do the testing and then this guy helpfully compiled the information.
Why don't manufacturers make this information available, on the packaging, or at least on their websites? It's pretty crucial these days when building a system, people are forever asking about it. And, not to get into the AGW argument that belongs in the politics forum, but some of us are concerned about our electric bills. Perhaps if the information was made clearer there'd be a slight brake on the tendency of cards to become ever-more power hungry?
I almost think there should be an obligation to provide certain standard information like this (and core and memory clock speeds, memory chip timings, memory bus width etc) on all cards' packaging, just as food manufacturers provide calorie, fat, salt etc information. But I reluctantly admit the technology used is probably too variable for that proposal to make sense (people could argue that these stats don't always mean the same thing or might have no meaning at all in some cases).
Why it would be nice if this were possible is it could stop tricky behavior like prominently listing the RAMDAC speed but saying nothing about the much more important issue of memory speed (perhaps in the hope people might confuse the two?) or listing useless checkbox features like AGPx8 (back when it made no difference to performance) while hiding the fact that the memory bus width is half the size of the normal card, as was the case on all those 'Special Edition' OEM cards. Likewise it would be nice to know the memory used without having to rely on some review site removing the heatsinks and having a look.
As it stands manufacturers partly compete to take advantage of people's ignorance about things like memory bus width, and suffer market pressure to add useless features and ignore important ones. If such things were all listed in a standard way would there not be more competition on the features that really mattered?
I was looking for an 2nd hand older, lower power, card for an older PC recently and, Lord, the amount of googling needed to work out what the actual stats of any given card were likely to be.
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