MSI Radeon R7 370 Gaming 2GB Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the the ASUS version of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 video card.

MSI R7 370 Gaming 2GB Idle Temps:

MSI Radeon R7 370 Gaming 2GB GPU-Z Idle

The MSI R7 370 Gaming 2G video card has no fans spinning at idle, so the card is dead silent. With no fans spinning to help keep the GPU cool we observed the idle temperature being 57C.

MSI R7 370 Gaming 2GB Load Temps:

MSI Radeon R7 370 Gaming 2GB GPU-Z Load

When gaming we hit 67C in a room where the temperature was 67F (20.5C), so we have no complaints at all. GPU-Z did not correctly report the fan speed on this particular card.

temps

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 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.

noise-testing

All of the cards have no fans spinning at idle, so the idle noise is the same on all of the cards. The only reason the system is above ambient noise levels is due to CPU’s water cooler fans and pump noise. With the fans running while gaming, the MSI R7 370 Gaming 2G hit 40.4 dB on our open test bench, so it didn’t get loud at all. We didn’t notice any choke noise or fan noise while gaming when we tried the card inside of a PC case. The noise between the three cards we tested was pretty much the same at both idle and load since none of the fans spun at idle and all GPU coolers were dual fan models with low RPM fan speeds.