PowerColor, Sapphire, XFX HD 7950 Review - PAGE 16

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.

Between the three graphics cards the PowerColor model had the lowest temps, followed by the Sapphire model and then XFX R950.

Looking at them compared to the reference version we can see that they are all more efficient, even with the higher clock speeds and all three cards were extremely quiet as well. When measuring the noise output all the graphics cards had a decibel range between 47 and 49dBA, which is where the case fans we use measure as well. This simply means all three of the graphics cards were quieter than the fans installed inside our Corsair 600T chassis. There were a few times when the cards would peek above 52dBA, but it was always short lived, as the fans would throttle down fast.

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.

The order in which the three cards compared in our power consumption testing was exactly the same was what we saw in the temperature test. This gives the PowerColor model a slight edge, with the Sapphire card in the middle and XFX card in third. Of course this is due to the varying clock frequencies and voltage, which the PowerColor model at 880MHz is going to be the lowest.

Between the tw 900MHz cards the difference was within just a few watts, so both are efficient, but the Sapphire model does appear to draw less voltage at 900MHz than the XFX model.