AMD Radeon HD 6790 Graphics Card Review

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

We're not going to dwell too long on these power consumption numbers, because the Radeon HD 6790 reference card we tested isn't indicative of a product we're likely to see at retail. What the numbers show though, is that the Radeon HD 6790 had the lowest idle power consumption of the group (by only a couple of watts) and peak power consumption that was well below the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

With power consumption scores that low, it should come as no surprise that the Radeon HD 6790 was nice and quiet throughout testing as well. Again though, since our test sample isn't going to be sold at retail, the acoustic performance of this particular card doesn't mean very much. We suspect the custom Radeon HD 6790s that will be sold by AMD's board partners are likely to be very quiet as well.