Cooling and Noise

Our Furmark benchmarks are an extreme way of looking at things. As you can see below, pushing the overclocked Black Edition to the max did warm things up, more than the reference card did. Just to compare I redid the benchmark with this card set to stock speeds and again with the Reference card set at 1000MHz. When they are both set at the stock speed the XFX card would cap out at 65 degrees, four degree’s lower than stock. When testing the reference card at 1000MHz I quickly realized that the stock cooler wasn’t enough and shut it down once it reached 90 degrees.

Outside of the actual cooling performance in Furmark how was the in game performance? Surprisingly well actually, its cooling performance while doing our benchmarking the card stayed nice and cool. The noise output was a surprise considering what I experienced with the reference card. See the reference card was very quiet until you put it under load, the XFX card was nearly the opposite. Idle noise levels were more than what we experienced with the stock design, but under load the noise levels didn’t ramp up like stock.