Power Consumption
Idle power consumption remains one of AMD’s strengths, and its latest effort tops our charts by using less than 100 W of system power sitting on the Windows desktop.
ZeroCore technology favors AMD even more prominently, though the GHz Edition card doesn’t quite drop as low as the already-available Radeon HD 7900-series boards. Even still, that’s an additional 10 W savings when Windows shuts off your monitor.
The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition uses more power than a vanilla Radeon HD 7970—not surprising when you consider its faster GPU, higher-clocked memory, and ability to dynamically increase voltage.
Although AMD says the GHz Edition board stays under the original Radeon HD 7970’s TDP, it still averages about 13 W higher system power consumption in our 3DMark demo. That puts it 73 W higher than a Radeon HD 7950 and 43 W higher than a GeForce GTX 680.
