by Rob Williams on October 18, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
AMD’s Eyefinity technology has helped gamers over the past year realise that multi-monitor setups are not that unrealistic, and thanks to great support from game developers, more gamers are considering the move. Sapphire, with its Radeon HD 5770 FleX, caters to gamers who do want Eyefinity, but don’t want to go broke in the process.
To test our graphics cards for both temperatures and power consumption, we utilize OCCT for the stress-testing, GPU-Z for the temperature monitoring, and a Kill-a-Watt for power monitoring. The Kill-a-Watt is plugged into its own socket, with only the PC connect to it.
As per our guidelines when benchmarking with Windows, when the room temperature is stable (and reasonable), the test machine is boot up and left to sit at the desktop until things are completely idle. Because we are running such a highly optimized PC, this normally takes one or two minutes. Once things are good to go, the idle wattage is noted, GPU-Z is started up to begin monitoring card temperatures, and OCCT is set up to begin stress-testing.
To push the cards we test to their absolute limit, we use OCCT in full-screen 2560×1600 mode, and allow it to run for 15 minutes, which includes a one minute lull at the start, and a four minute lull at the end. After about 5 minutes, we begin to monitor our Kill-a-Watt to record the max wattage.
I didn’t hold any major credence in Sapphire’s FleX cooler, as it doesn’t look quite as efficient as most of the previous Vapor-X and similar designs that the company has put out in recent years, but overall, the temperature drop between it and the reference is still quite notable. The same goes for power, which saw a minor drop overall, despite being the same card.