| HIS Radeon HD 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst | |
| Monday, 26 March 2012 | |
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Page 15 of 18
HIS HD7870 IceQ Turbo TemperaturesBenchmark 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 head room. 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. To begin my testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark's "Torture Test" to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained at a stable 23°C throughout testing. 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.
As previously stated my ambient temperature remained at a stable 23°C throughout the testing procedure, the cooler is very efficient and a heavy load from FurMark raises the temperature from 36°C (28% fan speed) idle, to 65°C load with an automatic fan speed of 47%. Putting the fan on manual and cranking it up to 100% saw the temperature drop to 56°C but the fan predictably makes extra noise. The noise level is tolerable, loud but not too loud. Your mileage will vary; everyone has their own tolerance levels. The default profile is very well balanced, but cranking the fan to 100% gives us an impressive 11°C reduction in load temperature. In the next section we will look at power consumption figures, let's go.
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Comments
Right now, the price to performance ratio of the latest 7000s is just ... uncompetitive, even when you stack them up against the 560Tis, 6870s, and other mid-range chips of the last generation.
The 7970 appears to have been released with dethroning the 580GTX 3gb in mind - similar price point, but somewhat better performance.
With the 680 GTX now out and the expected lower end models, it seems that waiting is the way to go. AMD and their partners will inevitably be making some price cuts. Plus, sooner or later, the custom AIB boards will come out for Nvidia in this generation.