HIS HD7950 IceQ Turbo 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 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 efficient and a heavy load from FurMark raises the temperature from 37°C (30% fan speed) idle, to 70°C load with an automatic fan speed of 60%. Putting the fan on manual and cranking it up to 100% saw the temperature drop to 70°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 a 5°C reduction in load temperature. The 28nm Tahiti GPU on the Radeon HD 7950 may well be the limit of what the IceQ cooler can comfortably manage and is possibly the reason why this particular model does not come overclocked to 1GHz as we see with a lot of the HD 7XXX series video cards released thus far.

In the next section we will look at power consumption figures, let's go.

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