Power Consumption
To test for power consumption we use the included iPower Meter found with our Thortech PSU. As system load figures obviously differ from idle it is extremely difficult to get an accurate figure of system draw and then simply take this figure away from the overall amount because each game will generate varying levels of CPU and hard drive activity. Dynamic power adjustments which fluctuate in game will also affect accurate power figures thus rendering any such power consumption calculations redundant at worst and approximate at best.
We will therefore take our system readings averaged over a benchmark run of Tessmark (100% load) and after 20 minutes of being idle in Windows 7. These can then be used as a comparison to other graphics cards to determine how much more or less power you can expect a GPU to consume.
Consuming just a little more than the reference design we found that all of the comparable cards at these level appear to consume pretty much the same amount of power under both idle and load conditions.
Temperature
To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.
There has been much debate over the AMD reference design regarding how efficient it is at dissipating heat. Thankfully the Pitcairn core doesn't put out nearly as much heat and thus the temperatures are much lower. Despite this, we can see that the GIGABYTE Windforce design keeps the cards temperatures some 10% lower than the reference design.
Acoustics
Perhaps the biggest complaint of the new range of AMD cards is the new cooler and more specifically the noise it generates. It is far from quiet and while one can adjust the fan profiles to suit your own tastes, it is still audible, often loud regardless of the settings applied. This description couldn't be further from the truth with regard to the GIGABYTE card. IT was silent under both idle and load conditions. Even running Furmark for 15 minutes (an extreme heat test), the GIGABYTE card barely raised above silent levels.
