AMD Radeon HD 7950 Tahiti Pro DirectX 11 GPU Review

Name: AMD Radeon HD 7950
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 31, 2012, 12:01 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 acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you 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 drawn by the graphics cards alone.

Total System Power Consumption

Tested at the Outlet

Quite simply, the Radeon HD 7950's power consumption characteristics were the best of the group. Both idle and load / peak power were below all of the other cards we tested. That wouldn't mean much if the card offered middling performance, but it was the second fastest, single-GPU powered card in the group, finishing behind only the Radeon HD 7970 most of the time, though the GeForce GTX 580 did have its moments.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, Video Card, dx11, 7950

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