Environmental Green is the trendy new colour to paint yourself and your company these days, and computer equipment makers have been paying as much lip-service to the trend as anyone else except in the area of videocards, where the latest, biggest and baddest gaming cards always Hoover up a huge amount of power to work correctly.

With its twin HD 3870 GPUs, the MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC videocard is not going to be the exception here. ATI recommends a minimum of 550 watts for the HD 3870 X2 videocard, and that's pretty much where PCSTATS stands also. Don't think of doing the Crossfire thing with a pair of these cards unless you are packing at least a 750Watt PSU with quad PCI express power connectors.

The MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC uses two PCI-express power connectors, an eight pin and a six-pin. The 6-pin connectors, like the PCI-Express x16 slot itself, deliver up to 75W of power. The 8-pin can deliver a whopping 225W (though the card has been designed to work with two 6-pin connectors as well). Maximum power draw should hover somewhere around 225W, then.

The only advantage to using a full 8-pin PCI express power connector is that this will enable the 'overdrive' overclocking features built into the ATI Catalyst driver suite. Now let's get a look at how much power the MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC actually draws in single and crossfire configurations.

Videocard Power Draw Comparisons

Here's how the MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC videocard stacks up in real life against a couple different cards We have no way of directly measuring video card power draw, so PCSTATS will measure total system power draw and compare that in 3D loaded (max value recorded in 3DMark06) and idle states (at Windows desktop). The power supply used in each test is an A-PFC compliant PC Power and Cooling 750W model.

Videocard Power Consumption (Total System Power Draw) Idle at Desktop Watts Ranking Palit HD4870 X2 2GB 177 Asus EAH3870 X2 1GB TOP/G/3DHTI/1G/A 153 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC 165 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC (Crossfire) 222 Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT CrossFire 195 Asus EAH4850 HTDI/512M 120 Asus EAX1900XTX 2DHTV/512M/A 160 Asus EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M/A 150 nVidia Geforce 9600GTs in SLI 166 Asus EN9600GT Top/HTDI/512M 152 Palit Geforce 9600GT 512 151 MSI NX8800GTX-T2D768E 196 MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE 183 MSI NX7900GTX-T2D512E 165 Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH 140 3D Loaded: Watts Ranking Palit HD4870 X2 2GB 421 Asus EAH3870 X2 1GB TOP/G/3DHTI/1G/A 390 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC 330 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC (Crossfire) 610 Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT CrossFire 549 Asus EAH4850 HTDI/512M 202 Asus EAX1900XTX 2DHTV/512M/A 333 Asus EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M/A 252 nVidia Geforce 9600GTs in SLI 313 Asus EN9600GT Top/HTDI/512M 220 Palit Geforce 9600GT 512 221 MSI NX8800GTX-T2D768E 345 MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE 315 MSI NX7900GTX-T2D512E 277 Gigabyte GV-NX76T256D-RH 213 (Overclocked) 3D Loaded: Watts Ranking Palit HD4870 X2 2GB 426 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC 339 MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC (Crossfire) 630 Asus EAH4850 HTDI/512M 231

At idle, the MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC videocard and test system draw approximately 165W. Energy consumption jumps a lot when the video cards are stressed under a 3D gaming load in 3DMark06. In this case, the total system power draw for the MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC test platform rises to a peak of about 330W. That's a change of about 245W when this dual card is working at its peak. Keep in mind that some of this additional power is being drawn by the CPU and memory. The 550W PSU recommended by AMD might be a slight overkill judging by these numbers, but we wouldn't want to go much below 500W.

The crossfire setup almost doubles the power usage to a whopping 610W! Your 550W system has now restarted or just blown up in protest, and you are reconsidering the idea of ignoring the box specs... Seriously, we knew that dual HD 3870 X2 videocards were going to use a lot of power, but 610W of total system power draw is impressive. The 750W or greater PSU recommended specs seem to be accurate as far as PCSTATS is concerned. Overclocking in single or crossfire setups did not boost the power requirements by any significant amount.

Now let's have a look at how MSI's dual-core creation overclocks.