Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels

Hardware installation

Installation of the product really is easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we now connect the 6-pin power connector to the graphics card. And yes... do make sure your power supply is compatible, preferably with a 6-pin power PEG header directly from the power supply.

You can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest ATI Catalyst driver and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.

Energy consumption

Lets have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed.

The methodology we apply: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load.

Our test system is based on a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58. This setup is overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). On average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to higher CPU clock settings, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.
Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is higher than your average system.

The card:

1. Advertised TDP = 120W
2. System in IDLE = 176W
3. System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 264W
4. Difference (GPU load) = 88W
5. Add average IDLE wattage ~ 18W
6. Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 106 Watts

Mind you that the System Wattage is measured from the wall socket and is for the entire PC.

Recommended Power Supply

So here's our power supply recommendation:

Radeon HD 5770 (single GPU)

• The card requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use a fairly mid-range to high-end system.

Radeon HD 5770 CrossfireX (dual GPUs)

• A second card requires you to add another ~100 Watts. You need a 600+ Watt power supply unit.

For each card that you add, add another ~100 Watts as a safety margin.

There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• freezing during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

The core temperature

Let's have a look at the temperatures this custom cooler offers.

We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming very intensely and continuously, we literally stress the GPU 100% -- which is actually more then your GPU would do with your average game.

We measured at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. Now we report at two stages the GPU(s) in IDLE and under stress. Here's what we get returned:

As you can see, we get respectable temperatures returned... when the card is clocked down we see a temperature of give or take 40 degrees C. And when we completely stress out the GPU 100% for a while, temperatures rise towards roughly 60 degrees C (168 F), that's excellent.

But is the cooler very loud then?

Noise Levels coming from the graphics card

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 bought 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. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

dBA

The noise levels coming from the card are quite extensive, in idle you will hear the card already well over ~42 dBA.

Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up. The card then reaches roughly 44-45 dBA measured at that 75cm distance. This is a bit of a downer alright as a product of this caliber should not require that much brute force fan activity at all.