PowerColor HD 5750 Green Review - PAGE 16

Temperature

To measure core GPU temperature, we used the hardware monitoring program in RivaTuner 2.24. The idle temperature was taken after leaving nothing running, on Vista's desktop, for a minute. The load temperature was taken after a few hours of running OCCT.

I literally fainted when I saw how well the PowerColor HD 5750 Green's cooler performed. I mean, the thing had no fan, I was expecting the card to hit the mid 80's at load. Boy was I wrong. This thing performed like a beast. It outperformed cards with fans, it even outperformed smaller cards. If the 5750 Green's performance didn't impress me, its' cooler definitely did!

Power Usage

To measure power usage, we used a Kill A Watt P4400 power meter. Note that the above 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 at the end of a 3 hour run of OCCT.

The PowerColor HD 5750's power consumption at idle was almost the same as the VisionTek HD 5750's power consumption. I was slightly disappointed by this, because I thought it was supposed to use 21% less power. At load, however, we saw the difference! The PowerColor HD 5750 Green consumed a great deal less power when compared to the VisionTek HD 5750.

Conclusion

Before I say anything else, I must say that the PowerColor HD 5750 Green is now one of favorite video cards. Seriously this thing is great. It consumes 21% less power then a reference 5750, it does not require any cables from the PSU, and you're not sacrificing any performance. Not only that but the card is dead silent! It is completely passively cooled and the cooler, amazingly, does an outstanding job.

Overclocking the card took slightly longer then usual, but it did overclock decently and the performance was just outstanding. Sure the card is not meant for the high end gamer, but for everyone else it should do just fine. In everyone of our benchmarks it gave framerates that can be considered playable.

The PowerColor HD 5750 Green is the first card in PowerColor's "Unplug" series. It uses PowerColor's new innovative Efficient Energy Transforming Technology, which is what allows the card to consume so little power. All without the sacrifice of performance. I personally can't wait to see more of PowerColor's Unplug series, because this one was just so awesome!

I'm going to recommend this card to anyone looking for a decent, silent, and great video card. This baby will cost you about $170, which is more then worth it in my opinion. As long as you're not looking for a high end video card, pick this baby up!