PowerColor HD 7850 PCS+ Review - PAGE 13

Temperature:

To measure core GPU temperatures, we run three in-game benchmarks and record the idle and load temperature according to the min and max temperature readings recorded by MSI Afterburner. The games we test are Crysis 2, Lost Planet 2 and Metro 2033. We run these benchmarks for 15 minutes each. This way we can give the included thermal solution and GPU time to reach equilibrium.

The maximum temperature of the PowerColor model was slightly higher than the reference design, but this card ran virtually silent while the reference model is known for being quite loud at times.

Power Consumption:

To measure power usage, a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter was used. Note that the numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took the sustained peak power drain readings after running the system through the same in-game benchmarks we used for the temperature testing. This way we are recording real-world power usage, as opposed to pushing a product to it's thermal threshold.

Since the PowerColor PCS+ is an overclocked model it does require slightly more power to run at the target clock speeds. However, the difference is only around 4 percent, well under the 10 to 13 percent increase in performance.