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, that's it. There are no 6-pin power connectors to connect. 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.

If you set up two cards in CrossfireX mode, simply pop in the additional card(s) in the closest x16 PCIe slot, link up the CrossfireX connectors, boot into Windows, install the driver and restart.

Power consumption

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

The methodology: 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 combo. 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.

Radeon  HD 5670 MSI Cyclone 1G edition

1. Advertised TDP = 61W
2. System in IDLE = 169W
3. System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 206W
4. Difference (GPU load) = 37 W
5. Add advertised IDLE wattage ~ 14W
6. Subjective obtained GPU power consumption = ~ 51 Watt

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

Recommended Power Supply

So here's my power supply recommendation:

Radeon HD 5670 (single GPU)

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

Radeon HD 5670 CrossfireX (dual GPUs)

• A second card requires you to add another 61 Watts. You need a 500+ Watt power supply unit if you use it in a high-end system.

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 huge 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 measure at a room temperature of 21~22 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 very respectable temperatures returned. When the card is clocked down and idling at 157 MHz we see a temperature of roughly 30~35 degrees C. And when we completely stress out the GPU 100% for a while, temperatures rise towards roughly 42~45 degrees C, that's really excellent.

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.

We measure at 75CM distance from the PC, as that's roughly the same distance you'd have from your PC at a desktop environment.

The noise levels coming from the card are perfectly fine, in idle you will hardly hear the card as we measured 38 dBA. Which is below the threshold of noise from the PC itself.

Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up. The card however remains steady and we still measure roughly 38 dBA which really is not at all a hearable noise level.