If there is one area where the GIGABYTE HD6970 can claim a clear victory, it’s the power consumption. It draws 15W less than the ASUS card at default speeds and more impressively, it draws 45W less when overclocked at a very small cost in performance. Compared to other graphics cards on the market, the GIGABYTE HD6970 fares favourably against the power hungry GTX480, its closest rival (the GTX570 results will be coming soon). However, it fails to provide the same efficiency as the GF110 based GTX580, an indication that Nvidia’s GTX570 will dethrone AMD’s reputation of providing efficient cores, which the former does already. In that sense, it is still disappointing to see that the power consumption being amongst the highest and significantly more than the HD6950.