Power Consumption & Temperatures
At its factory settings, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC-equipped system consumed 359 watts, 1.4% higher than the GHz Edition and 8% higher than a standard 7970. Our 1.2GHz overclock only increased load consumption by 1.6%, however, when increasing the voltage to 1.3v to achieve 1.26GHz, the load draw increased 12% to 403 watts. That's a significant jump, though it's mostly justifiable when you consider the performance gains.
Gigabyte claims its WindForce 5X cooler reduces temperatures by 18% over AMD's reference design. We recorded a 15% drop, though it's worth noting that the HD 7970 SOC ships with a factory overclock and Gigabyte's 18% claim might be derived from running its product at the same speed as the reference card (925MHz). Nonetheless, 15% is quite impressive, as is the SOC unit's noticeably quieter operation.
Overclocking the HD 7970 SOC to 1.2GHz only increased the load temperature 6% to 72 degrees, while adding the extra voltage for our 1260MHz overclock elevated temperatures 19% to 81 degrees. Even so, at 81 degrees the heavily overclocked Gigabyte card is about the same temperature as AMD's GHz Edition. It also makes about the same amount of noise, so again, impressive results from Gigabyte.