Sapphire HD 7950 FleX Review - PAGE 13

Temperature:

To measure core GPU temperatures, we run three in-game benchmarks and record the idle and load temperature according to the min and max temperature readings recorded by MSI Afterburner. The games we test are Crysis 2, Lost Planet 2 and Metro 2033. We run these benchmarks for 15 minutes each. This way we can give the included thermal solution and GPU time to reach equilibrium.

The Dual-X thermal solution perfomed brillanty in our testing, as it proved to be nearly 10% more efficient than the reference model. Of course the real high point of the cooler is it eschews the blower style fan for dual fan design, reducing the noise output coming from the card dramatiaclly compared to the reference design.

Power Consumption:

To measure power usage, a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter was used. Note that the numbers represent the power drain for the entire benchmarking system, not just the video cards themselves. For the 'idle' readings we measured the power drain from the desktop, with no applications running; for the 'load' situation, we took the sustained peak power drain readings after running the system through the same in-game benchmarks we used for the temperature testing. This way we are recording real-world power usage, as opposed to pushing a product to it's thermal threshold.

In our system the Sapphire HD 7950 FleX consumed more power than the refernce model, but the difference was only 6.5% at load.