Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 and 1GB GDDR5 Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR33. Sapphire HD7730 2GB GDDR3 (Super High Res Gallery)4. Sapphire HD7730 1GB GDDR55. Sapphire HD7730 1GB GDDR5 (Super High Res Gallery)6. Testing Methodology7. Unigine Heaven Benchmark8. Unigine Valley Benchmark9. 3DMark Vantage10. 3DMark 1111. 3DMark12. Alien V Predator (Direct X 11)13. Sleeping Dogs (Direct X 11)14. Tomb Raider (Direct X 11)15. Total War: Shogun 2 (Direct X 11)16. Dirt ShowDown (Direct X 11)17. GRID 2 (Direct X 11)18. Metro Last Light19. Thermal Dynamics20. Acoustics Performance21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

None of the cards on test today emit much noise at all, even under load. The ASUS GT630 has a set profile and the fan speed doesn't alter at all. holding at around 50% even when tasked with the synthetic Furmark stress test. Both of the Sapphire HD7730 graphics cards are relatively quiet at all times and ideal for a low noise, inexpensive gaming system.

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