MSI AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Noise & Temperature Testing Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,011 words · ~5 min read
0:00
this is going to be a quick video on the temperatures and noise of the radon
0:06
6870 so I've got my handy dandy little thermometer here showing us the room
0:10
temps because remember if the room temperatures go up by even 1° then the
0:16
card temperatures will go up by exactly 1° those are the rules they must be
0:20
obeyed so whenever you're comparing temperatures you have to remember you
0:24
have to know the ambient temperature so here you can see we have a 41° idle at a
0:29
2 2 and 1/2 uh 22 to 23° room temperature we're
0:34
going to treat this as sort of plusus one I mean look how sensitive this thing is if I put my hand next to the probe
0:40
over here watch the temperature Skyrocket just from the heat my hand's
0:44
giving off I'm not even touching the thing pretty crazy so you got to sort of
0:47
see look at that it's already up to like 25° just because of the heat from my
0:51
hand anyway so here it is at
0:55
idle it's basically silent at idle
1:01
it's got a little bit of a a little bit of fan normal fan sort of a grinding
1:06
noise uh within probably about 12 to 14 in but beyond that and especially inside
1:11
a closed case you will not hear this thing so 41° idle silent now let's see
1:16
what it looks like under a gaming load now we've got what would represent a
1:20
worst case scenario gaming load so you can see the room temperatures here and
1:24
you can see that running furmark in extreme burn mode is going to yield an
1:28
83° temperature you can also see that
1:32
the whoops fan speed has ramped up a fair
1:36
bit wow not really much at all that's
1:41
incredible oh wait no it has it's just not detected by After Burner okay so you
1:45
can listen you can compare those two clips
1:49
against each other so it is uh quite a bit louder but still quite tolerable
1:54
especially for like a performance like a mid-range performance graphics card so
1:58
I'm going to give you uh just some comparisons against the GTX
2:05
480 there's full speed in case you were wondering but I'm going to give you some
2:09
comparisons against the gtx480 as well as the 5870 just so you got a reference
2:14
point here's the 5870 for my noise
2:18
comparison getting nice and close to the fan now the 5870 is a touch louder than
2:24
the 6870 at least for my particular
2:27
samples um one thing that
2:30
I mean those fans look so similar but it almost looks like the new fan is a
2:35
little bit bigger you know what I'm going to compare that just a sec uh no
2:39
the fan is exactly the same diameter for some reason there's a little bit more
2:42
wor to this one it could just be that it's older it is a bit of an older card
2:46
so you can see that my idle temps on this particular card are
2:49
38° at least you'd be able to see that if my camera could focus on a monitor
2:53
for a change maybe that'll help there you go 39° 38° and then my room Temps
3:00
are around 22 23° so there you go now we'll ramp it
3:06
up now bearing in mind that this is a more powerful
3:12
card the noise level is quite a bit louder and it does get hotter so it runs
3:16
at about 90° using the default fan profile remember with afterburner you
3:20
can always uh change profiles around if you want so you can see we're running at
3:24
about 44% on the fan speed and uh 87° on
3:28
the GPU I think I said that yeah I already said that so I'm just going to show you just for context so remember f
3:33
mark is pretty much a worst case scenario for a game running uh like
3:39
absolute worst case scenario it won't get this hot it won't get this loud in
3:43
any sort of real game and this this only if you set it manually but I'm going to
3:47
go ahead and turn it up to 100% just so you see
3:56
it there you go okay moving on and
4:00
finally for comparison we have the GTX 480 which is uh in some ways the Top Dog
4:07
in terms of uh of noise generation due to the power and size of the GPU inside
4:13
it so you can see our idle temperatures are a little bit higher than the other
4:17
two cards that we were looking at at about 50° my room temps just for your
4:21
reference are around the same they're 23 1/ 12° okay and then in terms of fan
4:28
noise you can see that Fan's barely spinning I
4:32
mean look at this it's not going very fast at all um this is quite a quiet
4:37
card at idle but it's a bit of a different story underload so our gtx480
4:42
peaked at around just over 90° under
4:45
load can see here in fermar I want to stress again uh that not only for the
4:50
gtx480 but for the other cards that we're looking at here that furmark
4:54
represents an unrealistic gaming load it's mostly a tool for uh finding out
5:00
the absolute Max temps and uh making
5:03
sure that your card is 100% stable with an overclock
5:08
so there's your reference point for listening to it and just for fun I'm
5:12
going to turn this one up to 100% if you really want
5:16
to blow your ears
5:21
off quite quite loud at that particular
5:26
setting so go ahead and put it back to Auto I mean bear in mind the G x480 does
5:30
ramp up to about 80% fan speed um under
5:33
under an intense load like this anyhow