Temperature And Noise
At idle, the Radeon HD 7770 stays cool by virtue of its large double-slot cooler. In comparison, the Radeon HD 7750’s smaller single-slot heat sink and fan aren’t as aggressive. Even still, though, it’s a lot cooler than the Radeon HD 6850, which idles at 51 degrees.
Stressed by a 10-loop run of Metro 2033’s built-in benchmark, the Radeon HD 7750’s little cooler works hard to maintain reasonable thermals. At less than 80 degrees, though, the single-slot board runs only a bit warmer than the Radeon HD 6850.
The dual-slot Radeon HD 7770’s beefier heat sink and fan manage much lower load temps, second only to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 1 GB.
Happily, maintaining modest thermals doesn’t necessitate obnoxious acoustics. You’ll remember that we were disappointed with the amount of noise AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 made. The 7950 improved the situation substantially. And from one meter away, the Radeon HD 7770 and 7750 are far from intrusive. The 7770, in particular, does its job in relative silence.
Although the Radeon HD 7750’s fan is small, and the noise it makes is higher-pitched/more noticeable, the readings from our Extech 407768 still fall below the GeForce GTX 560 and Radeon HD 6850.
At idle, all eight of these cards run almost silently. The pump in our closed-loop liquid cooler was probably the biggest contributor to each reading.
