I have 6 of those and I have checked with the kill-a-watt and I can assure you that this is exactly how much power they use.
The rig that sits right next to me at the moment has two quad-core xeons, a bunch of hard drives and 3 of those cards. With all mining it currently uses 460-465W. When I stop the mining it uses 210-220W. One of the other rigs can barely run Solitaire but idles at 45W and goes to 215-220W during mining with two cards.
Oh yeah - and if you trust that page the 5850 should be able to do >400MH/sec. That's a BS - unless you water-cool it and waaaay overclock it. I've undervoltaged them (0.950V), underclocked the memory (500MHz) and overclocked them a bit (775MHz) and they do exactly 305MH/s and are perfectly stable and cool at 65-68C. I guess I could squeeze out another 30-50MH but I have to overvoltage them which makes even more heat and consumes more power - what I gain in megahashes I'll pay in kilowatts.
Well my dose 395 stable but with 1 or 2 HW errors in 24 hours, 388 without errors and 410 for short time. And you need to buy a batter kill-a-wat or you didn't count in idle power.
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5850/Pages/ati-radeon-hd-5850-overview.aspx#2EDIT: The only modification I made is Arctic silver thermal paste.
EDIT2: Mem @75 Core @ 948(395)942(388)970(410) stock voltage.
He said he undervolted his cards. I kind of wonder how much power I'm drawing from the wall. I would assume it's in the mid to high 400 range, but I'm overclocked and over volted
I wish people would stop trying to take into account the resale value of their video cards when figuring return on investment. by the time that you get around to selling them, technology will have progressed to point where they will be obsolete, or the market will be so glutted that nobody will want them.
Case in point. i planned on building a mining rig using one of two motherboards i have laying around unused. Bought the video card and then looked at the motherboards.... um... AGP. ack. so now the rig will have a new motherboard and CPU as well, and a $400 investment turned into a $750 investment. fortunately, for me this is a hobby so set backs like this aren't too upsetting.
a question on the MB though. it has 3 PCI-e slots, one is x16, one is x4 and one is x1. Can all 3 be used for video cards? will performance be affected? i'm not sure what the numbers mean.
Yeah, I don't know too many gamers that would be interested in 5xxx series cards now, since 7xxx cover the entire spectrum of price/performance and 9xxx series are due by the end of the year.
As for the slots, the x1 slot is shorter than the other slots so you'd need a workaround for that with a riser or an extender or something