| HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 26 March 2012 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 16 of 18
VGA Power ConsumptionLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to current demands, and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards turning "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that gets sent from various manufacturers every day, and get right to the point: your computer hasn't been doing much to help save energy... at least up until now. For power consumption tests, Benchmark Reviews utilizes an 80-Plus Gold rated Corsair HX750w (model: CMPSU-750HX). This power supply unit has been tested to provide over 90% typical efficiency by Ecos Plug Load Solutions. To measure isolated video card power consumption, I used the energenie ENER007 power meter made by Sandal Plc (UK). A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our test computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows-7 and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:
* Results are accurate to within +/- 5W.
The HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo consumes 16 (82-66) watts at idle and 145 (211-66) watts when running full load using the test method outlined above. As we can see in the GPU-Z screenshot below the HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo uses 0.825v when idle, when under load it uses 1.219v.
In the next section we will be discussing our overclocking with the HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB video card.
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Comments
Right now, the price to performance ratio of the latest 7000s is just ... uncompetitive, even when you stack them up against the 560Tis, 6870s, and other mid-range chips of the last generation.
The 7970 appears to have been released with dethroning the 580GTX 3gb in mind - similar price point, but somewhat better performance.
With the 680 GTX now out and the expected lower end models, it seems that waiting is the way to go. AMD and their partners will inevitably be making some price cuts. Plus, sooner or later, the custom AIB boards will come out for Nvidia in this generation.