AMD HD7770 & HD7750 Roundup: Sapphire, XFX and HIS

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.

Sapphire have clearly tweaked the power consumption of their HD7750 Low Profile card, as it only consumes 38 watts when gaming, and 49 watts under synthetic load. Incredible results and extremely impressive for a media center environment.

The AMD HD7750 is a reference point to work from, and we see that the XFX HD7770 Black Edition consumes the same level of power, which we would expect as they are clocked at identical levels.

The HIS HD7770 GHZ ED IceQ X is the most power hungry card on test today, which again we would expect due to the architectural differences, clock speeds and overall performance level. It is still a very efficient solution however.

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