Temperature, Noise And Overclocking Benchmarks
Load Temperature
Now that the CryoVenom is installed, let's see what it can do. The reference Radeon R9 295X2 hit 65 degrees Celsius in our 10-minute gaming torture test. Does VisionTek's card fare any better?
The CryoVenom R9 295X2 bests the reference card by an astounding 20 degrees, and never crests 45 degrees Celsius during our tests. This isn't a comparison between liquid and air cooling, mind you. These are both liquid-based solutions.
As if that wasn't impressive enough, do you remember when we mentioned that the VRMs can climb to over 105 degrees on the reference card? That's because they don't come in contact with the water block. However, the CryoVenom's block extends to the power circuitry and memory though, so it's reasonable to assume those components are operating at a much lower peak temperature, too. While the CryoVenom uses AMD's reference PCB without a beefed up power delivery system, the purportedly-reduced VRM temperature is very welcome and has the potential to enhance stability.
Overclocking
That brings us to overclocking. Of course we're at the mercy of the GPUs, since luck of the draw plays heavily into our hopes for higher clock rates. But blessed with lower temperatures, we should be able to extract the most headroom that these GPUs have to offer.
While we managed to run some tests with the graphics processors at 1160 MHz, we were only able to push the cores to a stable 1080 MHz.
As for the 8 GB of on-board GDDR5 memory, we increased it from 1250 MHz stock (5 GT/s effective) to 1500 MHz (6 GT/s effective). These overclocks result in a noticeable performance increase, as demonstrated by the 3DMark scores:
Noise
Lower temperatures and increased performance shouldn't come at the cost of unwanted noise in a no-compromise solution like VisionTek's CryoVenom. Let's see how it fares compared to other products after a 30-minute gaming loop:
VisionTek's CryoVenom nudges out the reference Radeon R9 295X2 for the best result. No matter how you slice it, this is a very low noise footprint, and is especially impressive when you consider the excellent temperatures that this product enables.