HIS HD7970 Crossfire Review

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.

When loaded, the graphics cards generally demanded around 390-400 watts when gaming. The results above are the maximum figures we achieved.

Above, the results when the Core i7 system was idle (219watts), and when playing Crysis 2 at 1080p (539 watts). A fairly efficient system considering the power on tap. By comparison we recorded around 830 watts from the same system when using two GTX590's in QUAD SLi, under gaming load.

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