- Aug 10, 2009
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I thought this important enough to have a separate thread from the reviews thread. I didn't want it to be lost in the pages of posts. I've been waiting for behardware.com to post their 7970 review. Well, for whatever reason, they haven't posted one yet. Their mother site hardware.fr has multiple reviews though and I decided to go and look there. The reason I was interested in their review is that they do thermal imaging of cards when they do their reviews. Info you don't get elsewhere. I decided to go and look rather than wait for the English review because I was reading some interesting posts in [H]OCP forum about crashes on O/C'd cards when GPU temps were not that high. Also reviewers needing 100% fan speeds to keep O/C's stable, again when GPU temps weren't really that high. My thought was that possibly something else on the card was overheating. Likely suspect the VRM's.
Anyway, here's thermal images of the card. Most interesting to me was the XFX DDE.
Reference card Idle:
Reference card load:
Reference card O/C'd:
No apparent issues that I can see with the reference card. Mid 80's are fine.
XFX DDE Idle:
XFX DDE Load:
XFX DDE O/C'd:
Not only are we seeing no benefit in GPU temperatures from the DDE cooler (actually a bit warmer), but the VRM's are actually running a lot hotter. 107 degrees (+22 degrees!) when O/C'd. They managed a much higher memory O/C with the XFX (1900 wow!), but it's only drawing 18W more, and likely some of that is the dual fans. Now, VRM's can run fine at 107 degrees. These results are with stock voltages (1.17v). I don't think dumping 1.3v with an O/C'ing utility would be a very good idea.
Seems like this card might have been rushed a bit and the cooler wasn't properly tested. This is just my opinion. Anyone else has a better reasoning for it though, feel free to post your opinion. Bottom line, this cooler is not doing a better job than the reference design cooling the card. I wouldn't be happy if I had paid extra to get a card, with what one would assume was a superior cooler, and see these results. Also, anyone who has this card might want to consider very carefully how much, if any, extra voltage they want to dump into it.
Now, I'm very positive about AMD cards. I'm sure most of the nVidia fanbois would consider me an AMD fanboi. Believe it or not though, even though I'm not without bias (who is?), I do consider myself fairly objective. For me, the XFX DDE does not have a very well engineered cooling solution. For those who have it, or plan on getting it, I would think pretty hard before dumping extra voltage into it. Maybe I'm over reacting, YMMV.
hardware.fr translated
Edit: Looks like there are problems with hardware.fr with the pics. Sorry they won't even come up for me now on the site. Hopefully they'll come back or have new links.
Anyway, here's thermal images of the card. Most interesting to me was the XFX DDE.
Reference card Idle:
Reference card load:
Reference card O/C'd:
No apparent issues that I can see with the reference card. Mid 80's are fine.
XFX DDE Idle:
XFX DDE Load:
XFX DDE O/C'd:
Not only are we seeing no benefit in GPU temperatures from the DDE cooler (actually a bit warmer), but the VRM's are actually running a lot hotter. 107 degrees (+22 degrees!) when O/C'd. They managed a much higher memory O/C with the XFX (1900 wow!), but it's only drawing 18W more, and likely some of that is the dual fans. Now, VRM's can run fine at 107 degrees. These results are with stock voltages (1.17v). I don't think dumping 1.3v with an O/C'ing utility would be a very good idea.
Seems like this card might have been rushed a bit and the cooler wasn't properly tested. This is just my opinion. Anyone else has a better reasoning for it though, feel free to post your opinion. Bottom line, this cooler is not doing a better job than the reference design cooling the card. I wouldn't be happy if I had paid extra to get a card, with what one would assume was a superior cooler, and see these results. Also, anyone who has this card might want to consider very carefully how much, if any, extra voltage they want to dump into it.
Now, I'm very positive about AMD cards. I'm sure most of the nVidia fanbois would consider me an AMD fanboi. Believe it or not though, even though I'm not without bias (who is?), I do consider myself fairly objective. For me, the XFX DDE does not have a very well engineered cooling solution. For those who have it, or plan on getting it, I would think pretty hard before dumping extra voltage into it. Maybe I'm over reacting, YMMV.
hardware.fr translated
Edit: Looks like there are problems with hardware.fr with the pics. Sorry they won't even come up for me now on the site. Hopefully they'll come back or have new links.
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