ATI Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire Video Card Review

Temperatures

Usually, we don’t dedicate an entire page to video card temperatures, but it was included this time around as it seems that it has become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers. To get load temperature results we used ATI tool to heat up the cards and used the ATI CATAYST Control Center to get idle and load temperatures.

With the ATI Tool open, the video card was rendering the object in the picture above at over 900 frames per second. This object puts the GPU at 99% load, which is great for heating up the car. We let it run for half an hour and it was enough to get the card up to 90 degrees Celsius. It should be noted that this was done on the open test bench with the motherboard laying flat, so expect slightly higher temperatures with the card installed in a case. Let’s take a look to see how the Radeon HD 3870 does against other ATI Radeon HD graphics cards.

Benchmark Results: The Radeon HD 3870 is is warmer at idle when compared to the Radeon HD 3850, but at load it is 2C cooler thanks to the dual slot cooling solution. This is right where we expected the card to be, so let’s move on to overclocking.