Power Consumption & Temperatures
The Radeon HD 6870 uses roughly the same amount of power as the Radeon HD 5850 when idle and under full load. This is fairly impressive, though it means that the Radeon HD 6870 consumes slightly more power than the GeForce GTX 460 (1GB).
The AMD reference cooler disperses heat well, as we found the Radeon HD 6870 to run considerably cooler than the Radeon HD 5870 and even the Radeon HD 5850. However, it does still run noticeably warmer than the GeForce GTX 460.