Legit Video Card Reviews

MSI R7970 Lightning Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review

Manufacturer: Micro-Star International
Product: R7970 Lightning
Date: Fri, Mar 30, 2012 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
Share:

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.9.2 at 640x480 resolution. We also ran the game HAWX 2 and looped the benchmark three times and recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter.

Total System Power Consumption Results

Power Consumption Results: With the MSI R7970 Lighting video card in our test system we found that the  idle state power draw at the wall outlet was 95 Watts.  During HAWX 2 gaming the power draw jumped up to 355 Watts and when running Furmark we hit a peak of 412 Watts! The load numbers are around 20 Watts higher than the AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference card, which isn't bad considering how high this card is overclocked.

Next Page - Temperature & Noise Testing


Review Index
Page 1 - MSI R7970 Lightning - AMD Radeon HD 7970
Page 2 - R7970 Lighting Retail Box and Bundle
Page 3 - The Test System
Page 4 - Batman: Arkham City
Page 5 - Battlefield 3
Page 6 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Page 7 - DiRT 3
Page 8 - H.A.W.X. 2
Page 9 - Just Cause 2
Page 10 - Metro 2033
Page 11 - 3DMark 11
Page 12 - Unigine Heaven 3.0
Page 13 - LuxMark v2.0
Page 14 - Power Consumption
Page 15 - Temperature & Noise Testing
Page 16 - Overclocking The R7970 Lighting
Page 17 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions