Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially with users asking for a quiet cooling solution, which is why engineers are now paying much more attention to the power consumption of new video-card designs. An optimized fan-profile is also one of the few things board vendors can create to impress with reference designs where they are prohibited from making changes to the thermal solution or components on the card.

For this test, we measured the power consumption of the graphics card via the PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot only. A Keithley Integra 2700 digital multimeter with 6.5-digit resolution was used for all measurements. Again, the values here only reflect the card's power consumption as measured at its DC inputs, not that of the whole system.

We chose Crysis 2 as a standard test representing typical 3D gaming usage because it offers the following: very high power draw; high repeatability; is a current game that is supported on all cards because of its DirectX 9 roots; drivers are actively tested and optimized for it; supports all multi-GPU configurations; test runs in a relatively short time and renders a non-static scene with variable complexity.

Power consumption results of other cards on this page are measurements of the respective reference design.

Our results were based on the following tests:

• Idle: Windows 7 Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024, 32-bit) with all windows closed and drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle mode until power draw was stable.
• Multi-monitor: Two monitors connected to the tested card, both using different display timings. Windows 7 Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) with all windows closed and drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle mode until power draw was stable.
• Blu-ray Playback: Power DVD 9 Ultra was used at a resolution of 1920x1080 to play back the Batman: The Dark Knight disc with GPU acceleration turned on. Playback started around timecode 1:19, which has the highest data rates on the BD with up to 40 Mb/s. Playback was left running until power draw converged to a stable value.
• Average: Crysis 2 at 1920x1080, Extreme profile, representing a typical gaming power draw. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the benchmark was rendering (no title/loading screen).
• Peak: Crysis 2 at 1920x1080, Extreme profile, representing a typical gaming power draw. Highest single reading during the test.
• Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high no-game power-consumption that can typically be reached only with stress-testing applications. The card was left running the stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

In single-monitor idle, the card consumes the lowest amount of power of all AMD cards we ever measured. Unfortunately, this changes once you connect a second monitor or start playing back media content. While NVIDIA's cards stay in their lowest power state, the R9 270X Series generously takes in more than twice the power of any comparable NVIDIA card, and the MSI HAWK needs even more! AMD should really invest a little bit of time into improving here.

Power consumption during gaming is increased over the reference design because of the higher clock speeds. But the difference is quite big, bigger than the extra performance delivered, which has the R9 270X HAWK fall behind the HD 7950 in performance per watt. The R9 270X reference design was actually significantly better than the HD 7950 in that test, yet I still think overall gaming power draw is reasonable for such a product as the HAWK.