AMD Radeon HD 6790 1GB Video Card Review

Temperature Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the graphics cards do at idle and under a full load.

AMD Radeon HD 6790 Video Card Idle Temperature:

As you can see from the screen shot above, the AMD Radeon HD 6790 had power idle states of 100MHz on the GPU core clock and 150MHz on the memory. We observed the AMD Radeon HD 6790 reference design to idle at 35C in a room with a temperature of 24C.

We fired up FurMark and ran the stability at 640×480, which was enough to put the GPU core at 100% load in order to get the highest load temperature possible. This application also charts the temperature results so you can see how the temperature rises and levels off, which is very nice. The fans on the video card were left on auto during temperature testing. When we hit the space bar to stop the rendering the temperature dropped.

AMD Radeon HD 6790 Video Card Load Temperature:

The AMD Radeon HD 6790 peaked at 71C according to Furmark and that is pretty good for a dual-GPU video card. We hit 73C on the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and 63C on the AMD Radeon HD 6850 in case you were wondering how those two cards performed on the same test with the same air temperature in the room.

We fired up Heaven 2.1 and noticed that in GPU-Z the GPU load was roughly 100% during the benchmark. The sound level wasn’t that bad at idle (21% or 1024RPM) or full load during gaming (31% at 1827RPM). If you’ve ever heard a Radeon HD 6870 then you’ll know exactly what this card sounded like.