Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 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 1.10.0 at 800×600 resolution. We also ran six game titles at 1920×1080 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.

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.