Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Vapor-X 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 Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X video card.
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X 3GB Idle:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X had an idle temperature of 34.0C in a room that was 22.0C (72F). The dual fans were spinning at ~1200 RPM and was the card was fairly silent.
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X 3GB in Furmark:
With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 57C and level off there due to the card throttling a bit to keep from overheating. Notice that the fan RPMs jumped up to nearly ~2,150 RPM, but it was still rather quiet!
The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X runs really very cool under load and had the lowest load temps of seven cards tested. This is very impressive considering it is one of the fastest as well! We observed idle temperatures around 34C and with the GPU under 100% load we were seeing 56C in games and just 57C in Furmark!
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.
The Sapphire HD 7950 Vapor-X graphics card was observed at 44.7 dBA at idle, which is pretty quiet considering this is a Radeon HD 7900 series card. Once you get the GPU at 100% we were seeing 56.4 dBA in games and 58.2 dBA in furmark. Not bad performance numbers from a very powerful graphics card!
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