XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB Core Edition 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 XFX Radeon HD 7850 video card.

XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB Core Edition Idle:

The XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB Core Edition had an idle temperature of 32.0C in a room that was 26.0C (79F). The single fan was spinning at 1034 RPM and was fairly silent.

XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB Core Edition Load in Furmark:

With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 74C and level off there. Notice that the fan RPMs jumped up to nearly 3,300 RPM, which is moving pretty good and you can most certainly here it!

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 XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB Core Edition was observed at 42.5 dBA at idle, which is impressive and pretty darn quiet. Once you get the GPU at 100% load that silence goes away as the single fan greatly increases in speed. We were seeing 51.1 dBA in games and 58.9 dBA in furmark. This card is certainly not quiet and if you are wanting a low noise card we highly suggest that you look at one of the dual-fan versions of this card as it will lower the temperatures and that in turn will reduce the fan noise since they don’t have to run as fast.