To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.
In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.
Power consumption is good, claiming under 190 watts when gaming. This rises to under 240 when placed under synthetic Furmark load.
Looks like a play on the reference design. very poor showing compared to XFX and Sapphire cards today….
would probably have been ok if they all used the crap cooler on launch day, but after reading the Sapphire review this looks so bad 🙁
This is exactly why HIS, Powercolor, Sparkle and all those crappy eastern makes never do well here. They just dont know how to target the enthusiast user. XFX and Sapphire are different. I bet Sapphire dont like XFX in their sector now. real competition heating up between those two for the top spot.
Fastest single chip video card.Runs cool and very quiet even at full load, gave me 40-45% extra performance than my 6970 HIS icecool,no crashes after hours of gaming!
http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-Radeon-PCI-Express-Graphics-21197-00-40G/dp/B006P88VO8?tag=emjay2d-20
great review-the most important point being that cooler cannot really handle the 7950 unless you have a large case and play games in a freezer-even then I doubt the cooler has enough capacity to continuously draw off enough heat to completely prevent instability problems under intense gaming conditions