ATI Radeon HD5770 Temperature

It's hard to know exactly when the first video card got overclocked, and by whom. What we do know is that it's hard to imagine a computer enthusiast or gamer today that doesn't overclock their hardware. Of course, not every video card has the head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they generate straight from the factory. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark 1.7.0 to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained stable at 25C throughout testing (it's still warm in DC...). The ATI Radeon HD5770 video card recorded 36C in idle 2D mode, and increased to 69C after 20 minutes of stability testing in full 3D mode, at 1920x1200 resolution and the maximum MSAA setting of 8X. The fan was left on its stock settings for this test.

69°C is an excellent result for temperature stress testing, especially with stock fan settings. The built-in fan controller generally runs the fan at 1200RPM during 2D or idle. On most benchmarks, the temperature never got above 65C and the fan stayed there. Once temps got above 65C, the controller ramped the fan up, to a maximum of 1600 RPM.

FurMark is an OpenGL benchmark that heavily stresses and overheats the graphics card with fur rendering. The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration. The benchmark also includes a GPU Burner mode (stability test). FurMark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card with lot of GPU power! As an oZone3D.net partner, Benchmark Reviews offers a free download of FurMark to our visitors.

FurMark does do two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than any other application or video game, and it does so with consistency every time. While FurMark is not a true benchmark tool for comparing different video cards, it still works well to compare one product against itself using different drivers or clock speeds, or testing the stability of a GPU, as it raises the temperatures higher than any program. But in the end, it's a rather limited tool.

In our next section, we discuss electrical power consumption and learn how well (or poorly) each video card will impact your utility bill...

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