Cooling

We logged temperatures over a period of time with Rivatuner while running Futuremark 3DMark05 in loop to stress the GPU.

ASUS 7950GT


EVGA 7950GT


Sparkle 7950GT


At full load there seem to be not much difference. Only from EVGA's 7950GT we noticed that it changed its fan speed when temperature started to rise. Also keep in mind that it is overclocked. Combined with a copper heatsink this card is equipped with the best cooling from our 3 competitors. Another thing to mention is that ASUS brings the only card without a heatsink on the memory. Measuring the temperature of one the memory chips by holding the probe of a GTH 175/PT digital meter on the center of a memory chip we got results well above 60°C.




Noise

The single slot cooling is quite compact, but this also means that the fan is rated to spin quite fast in order to dissipate all the heat once the GPU is under full load.

Their noise level was recorded with a SmartSensor SL4001A. The sensor was first placed ~100cm away from the front of the VGA card, and a second time only ~20cm away. The lowest dBA reading in the test room without any computer running was ~40.1 dBA. The CPU fan was turned off to reduce noise and concentrate on the reading from the VGA cards.



Testing outside a case the ambient temperature around these cards remained quite low, the fans on the Sparkle/Asus cards did not change rotation speed when going from 2D to 3D. The eVGA was noticeably louder under load, we could hear it above the Intel stock CPU cooler.