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Cooling and Noise
To put the slightly redesigned heatsink to the test we fired up Furmark and ran it through our standard 1080p benchmark. The end result was a max temperature of 72 degree’s. This is actually less than what we saw with the two XFX 7900 series cards. This can be attributed more to the HD 7870’s lower thermal output, but is still impressive none the less. As for noise, I did notice right away that at a normal idle the card is a little louder than we would expect, but as the fans ramped up there wasn’t any extra noise output. I actually had to check to make sure the fans were ramping up at all!