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.



The AMD R9 270X is clearly more power efficient than the HD7850 and out performs both NVIDIA cards on test. If you value power efficiency then the new AMD card is certainly the card to go for.

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.



The redesigned cooler didn't work any miracles here I'm afraid. While 74c is not exactly scorching, it is a long way off the HD7850. It's saving grace however is that ran cooler than the NVIDIA GTX760. It should be noted however that when overclocked, we ran the card with the fan at 100% and while noisy, temperatures were excellent so we are certain that given some tweaking to the fan profiles, a perfect equilibrium between noise and cooling power can be found.

Acoustics

The HD 7XXX series had a very good cooler. Under idle conditions it ran near silently and even under load it didn't break too much of a sweat, rising to a murmur. The new cooler mirrors that performance, staying relatively quiet throughout the testing. The cooler is however extremely noisy when manually adjusted to 100%.