Card Profiles:

Above are some basic card profiles to give you an idea of what to expect speed wise, along with the heat and power consumption while performing these tasks.

Power Consumption:

Notice in the test below that this is total system power consumption. We tried our best to push the load as much as possible on the video card alone and nothing else. We ran FurMark at the highest settings our system would allow. We feel FurMark gives the most reliable readings on GPU load and on how much wattage the card puts out without stressing other components in the system too much. (Total consumption measured at outlet)

The stock power consumption numbers were solid, in the middle of the pack. They were very reasonable from a card of this caliber and something we have come to expect from AMD and their video cards. Once overclocked and fully over volted to 1.5v, we saw the 6970 shoot up to the third highest power consuming card we have tested. We were expecting a big jump with 1.5v and that is what we ended up with. The 6970 still came out 100 plus watts better than the 480′s, which is a good sign for AMD card users. AMD keeps leading in this facet of graphics cards in today’s market and, hopefully, they keep steadily improving like they have in the past.

Fan Noise Test:

We chose to sort the decibel test by fan levels at 50%.
Why? A lot of fan profiles are set to different percentages at stock speeds. This will give you a false breakdown for the decibel levels as some fans may be running at 25% and some at 40%. That is why we chose 50% so that every card is on a level playing field, yielding the truest results.

With our decibel testing, we proved what our ears told us. The single fan cooling solution is LOUD. When set at 100%, it became extremely loud in the room and very annoying. We still are not sure why they continue to use this type of cooler, but if they insist on it, they should find a better, possibly larger fan, that can run at lower overall RPM. The lower fan speed noise was manageable and was not migraine inducing like the 100% would be after a short time.

Next: Temperature and Conclusion

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