MSI R5870 Lightning 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. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand.

The MSI R5870 is consuming significantly more power at load than a reference HD5870. When we manually overclock the card further we hit a whopping 248watts drain. While this sounds a lot of power, bear in mind that a GTX480 can suck 320w under the same conditions.

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