Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels

Hardware installation

Installation of the product is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we now connect the two 6-pin power connectors to the graphics card. 

Hook up your monitor and you can now power 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

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is slightly above reference, nothing extraordinary though.

The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. After we have run all our tests and benchmarks, we look at the recorded maximum peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. 

Our test system is a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

I'd say 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 a little higher than your average system.

Single GPU 5870 SEC

• System in IDLE = 207 Watts
• System with GPU in FULL Stress = 389 Watts
• Difference (GPU load) = 184 Watt (official TDP = 182W)

The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly 400 Watts and for a PC with this setup, this is very acceptable and certainly remains within baseline levels.

The IDLE wattage is very okay, the card is clocking down massively, resulting in an all time low power consumption (for our test PC). We'll show you that in a graph in a minute.

Recommended Power Supply

So here's my power supply recommendation:

Radeon HD 5870

• On your average system the card requires you to have a 550 Watt power supply unit at minimum (we recommend 600W) if you use it in a high-end system.

Radeon HD 5870 CrossfireX

• A second card requires you to add another 188 Watts. You need a 700+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system (800 recommended).

For each card that you add, just add another 200 Watts and 10A on the 12V rails 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 graphics card cooler performance examined

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 intensely and continuously. We literally stress the GPU 100% here as you can see in the graph. 

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 terrific temperatures returned, quite a lot lower compared to the reference cooler. When the PC has nothing to do, the card is clocked down to 157 MHz, we see a temperature of give or take 30 degrees C.

When we completely stress out the GPU 100% for a while, temperatures rise towards roughly 68 degrees C and that's really good. 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.

For each dBA test we close the PC/chassis and move the dBA gun 75 cm away from the PC. Roughly the same proximity you'll have a PC in a real-world situation.

The idle noise levels coming from the card are okay, in idle you will hear the card as we measured 42 dBA, which is right above the threshold of noise coming from that PC itself.

Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up as well but the card does not become more noisy. We measure roughly 42~43 dBA based on heavy GPU stress. So that makes the card not silent, not noisy either... but definitely continuously audible / hearable.