Methodology: temperature tests
AMD and Nvidia let the cheap graphics card segment “deteriorate” so much that Intel took advantage of it quite elegantly. The latest Arc A580 in the Sparkle (Orc) design has a lot of imperfections that you might not get over, but at the same time it has settled into the top spot when it comes to price/performance ratio in gaming. With this primacy, it profiles itself as one of the leading adepts into low-budget builds.
Methodology: temperature tests
We’re also bringing you temperature tests. You are at HWCooling after all. However, in order to make it sensible at all to monitor temperatures on critical components not only of the graphics card, but anything in the computer, it is important to simulate a real computer case environment with healthy air circulation. The overall behavior of the graphics card as such then follows from this. In many cases, an open bench-table is inappropriate and results can be distorted. Therefore, during all, not only heat tests, but also measurement of consumption or course of graphics core frequencies, we use a wind tunnel with equilibrium flow.
Two Noctua NF-S12A fans are at the inlet and the same number is on the exhaust. When testing various system cooling configurations, this proved to be the most effective solution. The fans are always set to 5 V and the speed corresponds to approx. 550 rpm. The stability of the inlet air is properly controlled during the tests, the temperature being between 21 and 21.3 °C at a humidity of ±40 %.
We read the temperature from the internal sensors via GPU-Z. This small, single-purpose application also allows you to record samples from sensors in a table. From the table, it is then easy to create line graphs with waveforms or the average value into bar graphs. We will not use the thermal camera very much here, as most graphics cards have a backplate, which makes it impossible to measure the PCB heating. The key for the heating graphs will be the temperature reading by internal sensors, according to which, after all, the GPU frequency control also takes place. It will always be the heating of the graphics core, and if the sensors are also on VRAM and VRM, we will extract these values into the article as well.
- Contents
- Sparkle Arc A580 Orc in detail
- Table of parameters
- Methodology: performance tests
- Methodology: how we measure power draw
- Methodology: noise and sound measurement
- Methodology: temperature tests
- Test setup
- 3DMark
- Age of Empires II: DE
- Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
- Battlefield V
- Battlefield V with DXR
- Borderlands 3
- Control
- Control with DXR
- Counter-Strike: GO
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Cyberpunk 2077 with DXR
- DOOM Eternal
- F1 2020
- FIFA 21
- Forza Horizon 4
- Mafia: DE
- Metro Exodus
- Metro Exodus with DXR
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Red Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan)
- Red Dead Redemption 2 (Dx12)
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider with DXR
- Total War Saga: Troy
- Wasteland 3
- Overall gaming performance and performance per euro
- CompuBench (OpenCL)
- SPECviewperf 2020 and SPECworkstation 3
- FLOPS, IOPS and memory speed tests
- 3D rendering 1/2 (LuxMark and Blender@Cycles)
- 3D rendering 2/2 (Blender@Radeon ProRender and Eevee)
- Photo editing (Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo)
- Broadcasting (OBS and Xsplit)
- Password cracking
- GPU clock speeds
- GPU and VRAM temperatures
- Net graphics card power draw and performance per watt
- Analysis of 12 V rail power supply (higher load)
- Analysis of 12 V rail power supply (lower load)
- Analysis of 3,3 V rail power supply
- Noise level
- Frequency response of sound
- Conclusion
