Temperatures & Overclocking
We have been using FurMark to test temperatures on video cards. It is more or less like Prime95 for video card. It does a great job and spits out what you see below.
As you can see during the 15 minute test the HD 7790 OC had a max temperature of 74C, which is not that bad at all.
Now many people have said this test is actually more intensive than normal gaming so I went ahead and ran the Lost Planet 2 benchmark and recorded the GPU temperature using GPU-Z.
As you can see here the card just peaked over 60C during the test.
Overclocking video cards is something relatively new to me, but with AMD card it is extremely easy. Using AMD’s OverDrive utility in the Catalyst Control Center you can easily change the values to overclock the card. I went for broke and set the GPU clock to 1200MHz. After running a full burn in on FurMark and running other benchmarks the overclock was stable. I did not see any screen tearing or artifacting on any of the tests that I ran.
I ran 3DMark’s Fire Strike benchmark to see the performance gain.
