Cooling and Noise

We spoke before about the unique cooler design on the R7770 Power Edition. Because of this we did a few more tests beyond our normal benchmark to check out the performance of each of its three fan configurations. First we ran through Furmark with just the single fan, the results compared to past results put it around what we saw with both Sapphire HD 7770’s that we have tested. Considering this I was interested to see how it would perform in the other two configurations. The double fan layout with the second fan on top of the first is going to push more air by increasing the air pressure while the second dual fan layout is going to have less air pressure but more surface area.

I found that the single and double fan configuration’s has similar noise output, while not silent the noise wasn’t any more than what we experienced with the other HD 7770’s. When moving to the dual fan design I noticed that when under load the fans didn’t need to spool up as much making that setup slightly quieter.

For cooling performance on the two dual fan layouts we saw a two degree drop in temperature when running the doubled up fan. But when we switched to the dual layout, the temps dropped to a whopping 57 degree’s, 9 degree’s lower than the single fan design. The best part is the dual fan layout doesn’t take up any more width than the single layout, but it does att about an inch to its length. The doubled fan layout does take up another PCI slot.

Another feature that I noticed while testing was that this model actually includes the dust removal technology that was first seen on the GTX 580 Lighting Xtreme Edition card. This spins the fans backwards when you first boot to prevent dust from building up in the cards heatsink.