AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Malta Video Card Review
Temperature & Noise Testing
Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the AMD Radeon HD 7790 6GB video card.
AMD Radeon HD 7790 6GB Idle Temperature:
The AMD Radeon HD 7990 video card had an idle temperature of 32.0C in a room that was 22.0C (72F). Not a bad temperature considering this card has 8.6 billion transistors and 4096 cores! Both cores had nearly identical temperatures, so we’ll just focus on one core to simplify things.
AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB in Furmark:
With Furmark fired up and saw temperature reach 75C, but notice that the GPU started throttling. The average GPU core clock is around 700MHz, but was bouncing between 500MHz and 1000MHz constantly.
AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Temps in Games:
In games we found the AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB graphics card would still reach 75C, but it would do so at 1000MHz core and 1500MHz memory and stay there. Note that we used 3206MB of the frame buffer when gaming at 2560×1600, so we put a good chuck of that frame buffer to good use. The fan speed was right around 2500RPM on the fans when running Furmark and in game titles.
We tossed up the temperature results in a chart and as you can see the AMD Radeon HD 7790 did pretty good when it comes to thermal performance and we have absolutely nothing but good things to say when it comes to temperatures and cooling performance.
Sound Testing
For sound testing we use 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 36dB. 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.
When it comes to noise levels the AMD Radeon HD 7990 was pretty quiet at idle, but was fairly loud when at full load. Our results directly contradict what AMD showed internally:
AMD also used Furmark, but this really isn’t really a fair comparison against NVIDIA cards as the Radeon HD 7990 is heavily throttled as we just showed you moments ago. We’ll replace the battery in our sound meter to double check our scores, but the way we measure sound and our ears tell us at load that the Radeon HD 7990 is a tad louder than the GeForce GTX 690 at full load.
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