Temperature

We fired up our copy of Furmark 1.8.0 and rendered the fur at 640×480 with no AA on “xtreme burning mode”.

Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests that a GPU can run. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark.

According to its developer, “Furmark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why Furmark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”

Furmark was left running for a period of 10 minutes after which the final load temperature was measured. The ambient temperature was 24-25C.

The cooler helps to keep this card cool with temperatures barely reaching 63C. Remember that 63C is the maximum temperature while running Furmark. The maximum temperature while gaming should be lower than this.

Power Usage (Total System Consumption)

Furmark 1.8.0 was run in extreme burning mode with the fur rendered at 640×480 with no AA. Measuring power usage with Furmark is the worst case scenario. Normally games are never able to put this much load on the GPU as Furmark does.

The lower amount of shaders in the HD 5670 help it achieve lower power consumption than the HD 4770. Remember that this is the power consumption of the total system including a quad core processor minus the monitor.

Overclocking

Furmark Stability test was used to find the maximum stable overclock. We used MSI Afterburner 1.5 for overclocking. After all the dust was settled, here are the overclocked frequencies. 1010MHz/1080 MHz (core/memory).That is some serious overclock. Let me repeat. Over 1GHz on the core! That’s a 30%  and a 8% overclock on the core and memory respectively. I would have liked to see the memory overclock more.