Cooling, Noise, and Power

The last bit of my testing is right up there with how good the in game performance is, in fact it might even be even more important. On small form factor builds, heat is the number one issue you will have to fight with and along with that a lot of the builds that are based on SFX power supplies also have to worry about power. For power testing I run through Unigine Valley benchmark and using a Kill-a-Watt I record the maximum power draw our entire test system pulls. Keep in mind this is a 6 core full sized PC so it is an extreme comparison to a smaller build but it gives us a good idea of the kind of power draw you can expect. In this case the new higher clock speeds gave the 380 ITX a bump in power draw from the 401 of the original R9 385 ITX card to 420 watts. At 401 the original was pushing the limits of the 450 watt modular SFX power supplies that were available at the time and adding 20 watts to that isn’t going to help. Lucky for us though Silverstone has actually brought out a 600 watt modular model and Corsair is prepping one soon as well so there is still a great option to power the 380 ITX in your SFF build.

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Next was noise testing. I test the fan noise when the fan is running at 50% and 100% fan speed. I used to also include idle numbers but with all of the cards turning the fan off at low power usage these days I have to stick with setting the fan to specific speeds to get an idea of what to expect. Funny enough our well used R9 285 has actually gotten louder, once I had it out of the PC I could hear the fan a little more than in the past, especially at low speeds. The 380 ITX however wasn’t bad when not under load. When I heated things up it did have to do more work than a full sized card given its small size so it wasn’t a surprise that it put out a little noise. If you crank it up to 100% fan speed, something it never did on its own in my testing, you can expect it to be in the middle of the pack but this is a little loud for a single fan card. The more realistic 50% speed wasn’t exactly quest but it was still in the middle of the pack as well. All in all for such a small card I don’t think we can ask for quieter.

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For heat testing I ran through two different tests. First I looped through Valley Benchmark over and over until the card hit its resting temperature using the stock fan profile. Here the 380 ITX warmed up more than I would like with a peak temp of 80 degrees Celsius. This is in line with what a reference card will run. The older 285 ITX however performed much better in this test. I then let things cool down then did the same test with the fan speed set to 100% on the card. Doing this lets us get a better idea of the actual cooling performance of the cooler rather than letting the fan speed profile run the temps up to keep noise down. Here the 380 ITX ran nice and cool at 59 degrees. Funny enough the older 285 couldn’t run as cool here. So what did all of this teach us? Well for one the 380 with more ran and more clock speed is going to run warmer than the older 285 ITX card. The cooler is still just as capable but it seems the fan speed profile has been adjusted a little to keep the noise down. I’m not a fan of running a high fan speed all of the time, but I would highly recommend changing the fan speed profile a little to have the fan speed up a little earlier to keep things running cool. If you let the 380 ITX warm up to 80 degrees that heat is going to soak into the rest of your PC over time. That said the cooler is still more than capable, that is a lot more than I can say from some of the other ITX cards I have looked at in the past that struggled to stay cool even with the fan turned up. 

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #37658 12 Feb 2016 18:59
LAN season is about to start and Sapphire has a new ITX card with a little more memory for your LANrig builds!

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