AMD R9 Fury X 4GB Graphics Card Crossfire Review

Power Consumption

With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of three different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load.

Here’s where things get a little interesting. Running our standard benchmark stress test, which is enough to simulate gaming; produced just 378W. When I checked the cards for usage, the first card was maxed out, but the second was only in about 20% use (judging by the LED indicators by the power connections). I then decided to turn to ol’ faithful and run Furmark. Even though Furmark shows 841W, your day to day use will likely be hugely less.

In the below image is during Heaven Benchmark, as you can see, the first GPU (right) has all of the LED alight, while the second GPU (left) only has 3.