If your chaging from a last gen card to next gen card.....

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

The guys at X-bit Labs have an interesting review on the Power Consumption and Heat Dissipation Current Gen Vid Cards vs Last Gen Vid Cards:

Contemporary graphics cards surpass the older products across a number of parameters like speed, functionality, complexity and, alas, power consumption and heat generation.

The new graphics cards from ATI, based on the RADEON X800 Pro and X800 XT Platinum Edition, have practically the same power consumption and heat dissipation in the Burn mode as the top-end products of the previous generation. At that, the performance of the new cards is of course incomparable with that of the RADEON 9800 XT/Pro.

Thus, if you’ve got a RADEON 9800 XT/Pro graphics card and want to replace it with a RADEON X800 XT/Pro, you will have no power-related problems whatever. Moreover, thanks to the lower power consumption and heat dissipation of the new cards in the Idle mode, the thermal environment will even improve in those cases when you have no “heavy” 3D applications running.

Get the full story here:

Power Consumption of Contemporary Graphics Accelerators. Part I: Graphics Cards on ATI Chips

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. nVidia could take a lesson from ATI on that one.