Legit Video Card Reviews

AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Manufacturer: AMD
Product: Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
Date: Fri, Jul 13, 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 1.10.1 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 AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition video card was handed to us by AMD and it looks like it was a cherry picked sample as the idle numbers were much lower than any we have ever seen before with a 7970 video card. We measured just 101 Watts at idle, a peak of 420 Watts in Furmark and an average of 373 Watts on six game titles. The load power numbers are slightly higher than all of the other Radeon HD 7970 video cards we have tested before, but this is likely due to the higher core clock and voltages needed to get there.

Next Page - Temperature & Noise Testing


Review Index
Page 1 - Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition - What is it?
Page 2 - The Test System
Page 3 - Batman: Arkham City
Page 4 - Battlefield 3
Page 5 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Page 6 - DiRT 3
Page 7 - Just Cause 2
Page 8 - Metro 2033
Page 9 - 3DMark 11
Page 10 - Unigine Heaven 3.0
Page 11 - Power Consumption
Page 12 - Temperature & Noise Testing
Page 13 - Overclocking The 7970 GHz Edition
Page 14 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions