AMD Radeon R7 265 Mainstream GPU Review
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely, power consumption, temperatures, 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 of how much power each configuration used while idling and also 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.
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We recently re-vamped our graphics test bed with a new CPU (Core i7-4960X), motherboard (EVGA X79 Dark), and memory (16GB Corsair 4GB x 4), and switched over to Windows 8.1 Pro. Thankfully, the system ended up performing well and offering consistent and repeatable power consumption numbers. As you can see, all of the cards consumed similar power while idling (sitting at Windows desktop, screen lit), and the higher-performing cards generally consumed more power than the lower-performing ones. The Radeon R7 265 in particular consumed just slightly less power than the Radeon R9 270X and GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost, but we're talking about a spread of only 17 watts across the three cards.
The Sapphire Radeon R7 265 Dual-X we tested proved to be relatively quiet overall. Under sustained load, the fans on the card did spin up to audible levels, but the card can definitely be considered quiet. It also produces a much lower-pitched hum than cards with barrel-type fans, which is easier on the ears in our opinion.
