Power & Temperatures
So some pretty clear indications that the 7900 GRE is overall, a pretty good value-for-money product, but AMD’s own cards just knock it down a peg or two, and while NVIDIA are of a similar value proposition, we’re only talking about one card with the rest of the NVIDIA stack coming in much more expensive, but that’s a given, as NVIDIA are typically more expensive, but do also give more features and functionality.
Now the other thing we need to look at is thermal and cooling performance. It’s here where we find the GPU temperature sitting around a fairly reasonable 73 degrees throughout the test with the hot spot coming in a little higher at around 81 degrees. When we look at the Memory junction temperature we see a higher but still manageable 92 degrees whilst the clock speed sat below its rated speed at around 2200MHz though when we first started the run, we were seeing above 2400MHz but those temperatures must just be forcing it down slightly. The power usage of the card remained at around 285 watts throughout the test, all while the fans barely span up at only around 1000 RPM throughout meaning the card stayed a reasonable temperature while being barely audible.
