XFX 7770 Super OC Temperatures

Benchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you're an overclocker, gamer, or merely a PC hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there's no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking Video Cards, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a graphics cards for better performance. Of course, not every video card has overclocking headroom. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

At the start of the test, I measure the idle temperature of the card with the card sitting at the Windows desktop, using the GPU-Z utility. Next, I start FurMark's stress test and let it run until the temperature curve flattens and the temperature has not varied more than 1 degree in the last five minutes.

FurMark does two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than applications of video games realistically could, and it does so with consistency every time. FurMark works great for testing the stability of a GPU as the temperature rises to the highest possible output. The temperatures discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world performance.

The XFX R7770 Black Super Overclocked Edition with Double Dissipation lacks the fancy heat-pipe equipped vapor chamber cooler of the larger HD 7900 series cards, but its much smaller die and lower transistor count means that it simply doesn't generate that much heat. Interestingly the idle and maximum temperatures are identical to the ones I recorded for the XFX Radeon 7950 card.

The fans ramped up to a little over 50% speed for this test, and were almost inaudible. This would be a good card if you're concerned about system noise.

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