Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2GB Dual Fan Review - PAGE 18

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 thermal performance of the dual fan solution was nothing short of amazing! As you can see the HD 6970 with Sapphire's cooling solution was more efficient than another other graphics card in our graphs. Even cards with a considerably lower TDP, such as the GTX 560 were nearly 10°c warmer than the Sapphire model. Also, the fans were amazingly quite, and when set to auto they were nearly inaudible.

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.

The power consumption of the Dual-Fan graphics card was right were we expected it to be.