Power-draw and overclocking
Here's an interesting graph for you. The three sets of numbers related to the at-mains power-draw when the card is idling and driving one screen, idling and driving three screens, and under load when running Crysis 2 on three screens.
The gaming numbers make sense as each generation of GPU pulls more watts than the previous one, though there's not a huge amount in it. The single-monitor idling figures also make implicit sense, but idling on the Windows desktop and running three screens, as you would for productivity purposes, shows the HD 6970 and HD 7970 to pull significantly more watts than the HD 5870.
Now, remember that the HD 5870 is connected to three screens slightly differently than the other two - it uses a straight DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort connection rather than a DVI-to-miniDP dongle (HD 5870 doesn't have a miniDP connector, remember.) We can only assume that this connection method enables the GPU to fully clock down when idling - the HD 6970 and HD 7970 run at higher-than-expected clocks. Anyway, we'll investigate more and update this section.
Overclocking
Reference is reference, it seems, as we managed to attain exactly the same overclocked frequency on the Sapphire card as on the AMD-supplied version, leading to figures of 1,075MHz core and 6,100MHz memory. Please head back to the original review to see how the overclocked card compares against a plethora of other GPUs.
