i don't know why people expectations have changed from unrealistic performance to now unrealistic power usage. The card can be just a competitive card with good performance near, at or beating a gtx 580 with a relatively high power usage(still not as high as the gtx 580) which is completely believable and I think will happen. The 5870 has a power usage of 212 watts at peak in furmark and it's significantly lower in gaming, but if we are going to go by that method, so does the gtx 580. If we test during game sessions, the gtx 580 consumes around 225 watts as wizzards test show, while the 5870 consumes 144 watts. If by gaming tests, power consumptions goes up to 200 or 190 watts, this is completely believable for the 6970. However they don't look nearly as awe-inspiring while the gtx 580 is at 225. It's better power efficiency than the gtx 580, but not super incredible.

The only way your going to get close to that 150 watt number flopper(and you still won't reach it) is if you compare real world gaming scenarios running on the 6970, vs a gtx 580 running furmark which is hardly a fair comparison.

In a peak tests like furmark, there is no way the 6970 is staying under 200 watts. You guys have to remember the 2gb of slower ddr5 vs 1gb of slower ddr5 added 30+ watts to the power consumption of the 5870.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/324...d/index17.html

The 6970's memory is significantly faster so it should add more than 30watts+. Lastly one of the most telling tales is the size of the chip and the frequency. This chip is larger than the 5870 and clocked higher. Ultimate if the 6970 has more efficient shader usage, power consumption should be going up considerably.

The reason why the 6870 is more efficient size wise compared to the 5870 and they have similar performance is because the 6870 is actually using its shaders, while a lot of the 5870 shaders are just idle. Hence when you run furmark which uses all the power a graphics card, the power consumption on the 5870 jumps from 144 to 212w or a 48% jump compared to the 6870 which jumps from 127 watts to 163 watts or a 28% jump.

They actually have similar performance per watt in gaming scenario's, furmark just shows how how efficiently those shaders are being used in games when you compare the two. The larger the difference between the two, the less efficient the shaders are being used.

If the 6970 has high performance, it's power usage should go up considerably if it is an efficient architecture because that performance is coming from shaders doing work rather than just idling. The cost of performance is energy and the 6970 is not all of a sudden going to outperform the 5870 in games by 30 or 40% and consume less power.

I noticed the r300 tag disappeared..