MSI R7970 Lightning Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review

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 640×480 resolution. We also ran the game HAWX 2 and looped the benchmark three times and recorded the highest Wattage seen on the meter.

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.