Power consumption
Bringing significant power to the fore, idle consumption is pretty competitive.
But powering two high-speed Cayman cores has to hurt at some point. Punching through watts like no other, you literally pay for top-line performance.
It's no surprise to see the Radeon HD 6990 and OC take the bottom two spots here. What is of concern is the power-draw differential between the card in its two states. Closer examination of the frequencies shows that while PowerTune kicked in for default and OC modes, its effect in reducing the clocks was far milder for the OC. Running closer to spec means that power-draw is higher.
However, going by our bunch of games, the board, in either state, didn't throttle at any point.
The lack of real performance difference and heightened power-draw means the OC mode is best-suited to breaking records. We'd run the board in the default state.
