Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14

Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Currently reviewed card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.4 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

The latest version of the OC GURU II overclocking utility can be downloaded from the manufacturers’ website and from the main interface we can fine-tune the clocks for both GPU and memory, increase the voltages, set custom fan curves and more:

The Monitoring section can be opened in a more advanced way, which shows live graphs of the current GPU Clock, Memory Clock, GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage, current Fan Speed or GPU Temperature:

In order to create new fan profiles, we will have to access the respective section and draw a graph:

The location of the OSD can be modified, along with the hot key, the Screenshot hot key and some screen settings:

Temperature tests:

For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 40 to 50 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 19.4 degrees Celsius:

Noise measurements

Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.7dBA (with everything turned off).

At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.

The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of Catalyst Control Center: