MSI R7970 Lightning Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅18-02-13
Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption
Power Consumption
To test for power consumption we do not use anything to technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.



You should be under no illusion that the MSI R7970 Lightning is a hungry beast and will consume a fair whack of power. With the voltages increased to their maximum (standard BIOS), the R7970 eats its way through 80W more than the reference design! Still, with the huge overclocks, this came as little surprise and I'm sure will be of little worry to those seeking a card with such overclocking potential.

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 ran Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained.



The massive cooler atop of the custom PCB did its job very well. While it couldn't be accused of being quiet, it wasn't intrusive unless the fans were manually increased.

Let's move on to our suite of benchmarks...

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