AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures have been crazy this summer in the heartland. One day this month is was 109F and a couple days later it was 90F. This has caused us to throw our temperature testing numbers out the window, so today we’ll be showing you just idle and load numbers for the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition video card.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition had an idle temperature of 41C in a room that was 26.6C (80F).

AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Furmark:

With Furmark fired up and running at 800×600 we saw the temperature reach 82Cand level off there. The fan was on auto and was spinning at 47% or ~2600RPM during this test. The fan was very loud and as you can see boost was not enabled as the card was running at 1000MHz due to how strenuous the GPU load and power draw was.

After ending the 3D render we see that the card was slowly cooling down, but the recovery time was not that fast due to the reference GPU cooler design. The AMD reference GPU cooler gets the job done, but 3rd party solutions are much better and quieter.

Sound Testing

We recently upgraded our sound meter to an Extech sound level meter with 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 38dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

We told you that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition video card was loud in furmark, but here you can see just how much louder it really was as it hit 66.6 dBA! The Sapphire HD 7970 with the Dual-X GPU cooler was over 18 dBA quieter, so if you are buying a Radeon HD 7970 you might want to look into one with a better GPU cooler if noise matters to you.