AMD Radeon HD 7790 Video Card Review w/ Gigabyte & Sapphire

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 four game titles at 1920×1080 by averaging the peak results recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter for the gaming results.

Power Consumption Results: When it comes to power consumption the AMD Radeon HD 7790 cards with the new Bonaire GPU do pretty well. All of the current generation cards idle fairly close to the same as our system pulled between 96-101 Watts at the wall with any of the cards when at idle. In gaming we start to see the cards true colors and that the Gigabyte GV-7790OC-1GD used a little more power than the Sapphire HD7790 Dual-X OC. The same was true for when we ran FurMark, which is an OpenGL test that easily heats up the cores. As you can see the AMD Radeon HD 7790 doesn’t use the most power on FurMark, so it looks like AMD is limiting the power draw for this application now.