AMD Radeon 7870 2GB Graphics Card Review
Chris Hadley / 13 years ago
To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment.
As we’ve seen of late, AMD’s ZeroCore technology is very efficient at reducing power draw when the card is in its idle state. Here we find a power draw of around 100W at idle and a modest 221.3W at full load.