AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman

Name: AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman - Page 13
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 15, 2010, 12:00 AM EDT

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.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Our power consumption tests don't show much to differentiate the Radeon HD 6970 from the GeForce GTX 570--both cards are within a few watts of one another under both idle and load conditions. Both cards also use much more power than the Radoen HD 5870 under load, which is an obvious result of their relatively large die sizes and high clock speeds. The Radeon HD 6950 also consumed a fair bit more power than the HD 5870, but the delta was much smaller.

With power consumption up from the previous generation, it should come as no surprise that heat output is increased as well. We found the Radeon HD 6900 series cards to idle in the low 40'C range but lead temps hover in the upper 80's.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, dx11, 6900 Series, 6970, 6950

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com