Cooling, Noise, and Power

For my last bit of testing I wanted to check out some of the other aspects of a video card beyond just graphical performance. These tests cover the cooling performance, noise output, and total power usage of the R7 370 Strix. These are also a great way to be able to compare similar modeled cards, specifically I’m curious how the Strix will compare to the Sapphire R7 370 and also the GTX 950 that we tested last week that has the same Strix cooler as this card. To start off my testing I ran our peak wattage tests using both the heaven benchmark and the more demanding Valley benchmark. In the Heaven benchmark the Sapphire and Asus R7 370’s came in at the exact same 323 wattage with the GTX 950 just a few watts lower. Valley was similar with all three cards being within just a few watts of each other as well.

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Next I tested the overall noise output of the R7 370 Strix. Here I test the fan noise at 100% fan speed and 50% fan speed. I do test at idle as well but all of the recent cards including this one actually turn off the fans completely under low load so it’s not worth graphing out anymore. So how did the R7 370 Strix perform? Well at 100% fan speed it is up in the top portion of our charts making it one of the quieter cards I have tested. It’s not a big surprise that the GTX 950 with the same exact cooler put out nearly the same amount of noise though. This is noticeably quieter than the Sapphire. At 50% fan speed the numbers are quieter of course and also up near the top of the charts as well.

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For the last test I heated the R7 370 Strix up using the Valley Benchmark until its temperatures leveled off. The end result was a slightly warm 74 degrees. For comparison the Sapphire R7 370 ran 4 degrees cooler and the GTX 950 with the same cooler ran 5 degrees cooler. What that tells us is that the Sapphire card seems to be a little more efficient at cooling the R7 370 and the GTX 950 as a whole runs a little cooler than the 370 as well.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #37023 25 Aug 2015 16:28
No you aren't seeing double, the two matching cards on our front page are the Asus GTX 950 Strix and the Asus R7 370 Strix. Check out how they compare to each other in our review.

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