Noise
To observe the noise levels produced by the various solutions, we put the cards in a Cooler Master RC-690 II Advanced casing and measured noise at idle and in load. We used an SSD and all the fans in the casing, as well as the CPU fan, were turned off for the reading. The sonometer was placed 60 cm from the closed casing and ambient noise was measured at +/- 20 dBA. Note that for all the noise and heat readings, we used the real reference design of the Radeon HD 7950, rather than the press card supplied by AMD.
While the GHz Edition is as quiet as the standard Radeon HD 7970 at idle, in load it gets louder and even exceeds the levels of the GeForce GTX 690 and is on a par with the GeForce GTX 590.
Temperatures
Still in the same casing, we took a reading of the GPU temperature as reported by the internal sensor:
The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is well cooled.
