The things you'll receive
Hmm
.. a little disappointing ... Normally XFX provides some or at least a great game with the card. This bundle does not include any game. In the box we see the following:
- Driver CD with a set of tools
- 3D-Edit Video editing suit
- S-Video Cable
- DVI to VGA Adaptor
- Molex Y power connector
- Manual
XFX does include a 3D-Edit Video editing suite ... but quite frankly .. I don't think that the people who buy their last AGP performance gaming card like this even care about such software. Notable due to it's high clocks is the fact that the product is covered by a two year warranty.
Inside the box we find the bundles items
Power Supply - Watt Did You Say?
Much like the reference model power consumption of this card is really not bad, in fact it's even better compared to the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Of course the GeForce 7800 GS requires a stable 12-volt power source for best performance, reliability and most of all that gaming experience of yours.
For a GeForce 7800 GS graphics card, NVIDIA recommends a 400 watt power supply with 20 ampere on the 12 volts rails. So NVIDIA is recommending nothing too dramatic in terms of a power supply unit. Let's test that.
What we always do with new graphics' cards, we measure the wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the entire PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. So please understand that using a Wattage meter is not the most reliable way of measuring power consumption. You basically look at how much power is the power circuit from your house pulling from the PSU. So you need to look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science.
The methodology: we simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify power cinsumption. The graphics card consumes roughly 75-90 Watts at peak during 3D gaming, this is also the reason why we see a Molex power connector on the card as that much power being drawn over the motherboard is simply not possible.
In 3DMark the PC shows a maximum peak use of 280 Watt. Slightly higher than the reference model
due to the fact the card comes overclocked.
So indeed, you need 350 at the least as you want some spare wattage and 400 Watts is definitely recommended. When you buy a new PSU then look at the packaging and check the 12 volts rail on Ampere, it should be 20 AMPS minimal.
What would happen if your PSU can't coop with the load ?:
- bad 3D performance
- crashing games
- spontaneous resetting PC
- freezes during gameplay
- PSU overload can cause it to break down
So many things can happen.
Temperature of the graphics card
As always the standard reference cooling design works really efficiently. This XFX card uses the same cooler as the reference model we recently tested
At idle, normal operation, expect roughly 40 Degrees C. At 100% graphics core utilization we measured a maximum 69 Degrees C peak temperature, which is actually becoming the norm. Ventilation, the cooling fan at 100% utilization does not make a lot of noise at all, in fact the HD is producing way more noise then the reference cooler on this NVIDIA graphics card and that's very nice to observe.
The bigger two slot exhaust coolers we see on a lot of cards these days actually do have my preference as single slot coolers tend to dump that heat inside your PC, where as the dual slot coolers are designed to dump that heat outside the PC. As always, make sure your PC is well ventilated.
Really nice IDLE temperatures.
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
Nauseating. Yes I'm talking about the noise that PC's these days produce. The only way that will change that is if we all will pay attention to it.
When graphics cards produce a lot of heat usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bough a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.
|
TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS |
|
Jet takeoff (200 feet) |
120 dBA |
|
|
Construction Site |
110 dBA |
Intolerable |
|
Shout (5 feet) |
100 dBA |
|
|
Heavy truck (50 feet) |
90 dBA |
Very noisy |
|
Urban street |
80 dBA |
|
|
Automobile interior |
70 dBA |
Noisy |
|
Normal conversation (3 feet) |
60 dBA |
|
|
Office, classroom |
50 dBA |
Moderate |
|
Living room |
40 dBA |
|
|
Bedroom at night |
30 dBA |
Quiet |
|
Broadcast studio |
20 dBA |
|
|
Rustling leaves |
10 dBA |
Barely audible |
We startup a benchmark, we take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card. We measure roughly 47 dBa which is to be considered a moderate noise level coming from the PC. Again, this is a very subjective test.
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