Legit Video Card Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB Video Card Review

Manufacturer: Sapphire
Product: Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB
Date: Thu, Jun 28, 2012 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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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 1.10.0 at 800x600 resolution. We also ran six game titles at 1920x1080 and averaged the peak results recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter for the gaming results.  The AMD Radeon HD 6990 with Catalyst 12.4 WHQL drivers doesn't play nice with Furmark in full-screen mode, so we will not be including those results.

Total System Power Consumption Results

Power Consumption Results: The Sapphire HD 7970 OC was tested at the 950MHz clock mode and was on par with the MSI R7970 Lighting 4GB card in terms of power use. With the Sapphire HD 7970 OC 3GB card in our test system we idled at 106 Watts and peaked at 415 Watts in Furmark. SAPPHIRE recommends a 500W or larger power supply and that recommendation appears to be correct.

Next Page - Temperature & Noise Testing


Review Index
Page 1 - SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB
Page 2 - Retail Box & 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 - Power Consumption
Page 14 - Temperature & Noise Testing
Page 15 - Overclocking The 7970 OC - How Far Will It Go?
Page 16 - Final Thoughts & Conclusions