Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 2GB OC Edition 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 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. The Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 Dual-X 1GB OC and the Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 2GB OC both had the same power draw at an idle, but when we started to use the cards we noticed some difference. For example in the games the 2GB version used 16 Watts more power and in Furmark it used 10 Watts more. This is likely due to the fact that it has to power up twice as much memory, so this is to be expected.