GPUs Hardware Reviews

VGA Extreme: rectangular scrambled eggs, hot dog, fondue and heating benchmark | Retro 12 years ago

Random inventions have the charm of the extraordinary, so why shouldn’t we even make solving our everyday problems the subject of a benchmark? Not too long ago we sat early on a rainy and extremely unfriendly Sunday at a full 15°C in our editorial office. The heating failure and unsuccessful attempts to contact the responsible installer led us in the end to the idea of testing the computer with different constellations as a heater.

The initial configuration was the pair of two HD 6990s, as we also came up with the idea for this showdown when using these cards. The starting value is a room temperature of 15 °C. The first run, started with 15.5 °C, we consulted only to confirm our readings. The room was tempered by opening the balcony door and a subsequent break to distribute the air from approx. 20 minutes. The initial temperature was checked at a total of 4 locations in the room, the respective intermediate and final temperatures were measured in the middle of the room.

We also do not want to hide two important advantages of our graphics card heating compared to the conventional oil radiator: we were able to surf the Internet with the heating system in between and also had a nice blower with 8 installed fans for the distribution of the heated air.

 

HISRadeon HD 6990 OCHISRadeon HD 6990 OC Asus GTX 590Asus GTX 590 Einhell Oil RadiatorEinhell Oil Radiator

 

Test setup
Graphics card test 1
HIS Radeon HD 6990 single card
maximum consumption
Eel 375 watts
Graphics card test 2
HIS Radeon HD 6990 Crossfire
OC-BIOS
maximum consumption
Eel 900 watts
Graphics card test 3
Asus Geforce GTX 590
maximum consumption
Eel 390 watts
   Control heater
Einhell S 75
1500 watts
3 heating stages:
– 600 watts
– 900 watts
– 1500 watts
Room size
20 m2
Air content
64 m3
System
Intel Core i7 2600K x 4.5GHz
16 GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600
SSD 250 MB Samsung 470
3 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue
Corsair AX 1200
Stress
3DMark Vantage (Perlin Noise Loop) for GPUs and Prime 95 for CPU

Reference pass: 2 x HD 6990 with OC BIOS

This pass is almost the “great father” of this practical benchmark, for which we were able to warm up quickly on cold days.

Temperature development

Start is at 15°C room temperature. You get cold feet and hands while sitting still, but a solution is in sight…

After about 20 minutes it is already 2.2 °C more, an astonishing increase in a relatively short time. In addition to the PC, it is already pleasantly warm.

After one hour we reach 19.2 °C already 4.2°C more. The increase is already a little slower.

The final temperature of 20°C is reached in just under 2 hours. This temperature did not increase after 15 more minutes.

Benchmark results

Surprised? We don’t. Thanks to additional circulating air, the radiator is beaten smoothly at comparable performance. Interesting for those who don’t have a radiator, but a powerful PC. This is where waste heat brings real added value! The AX 1200 power supply from Corsair has been able to cope with the load on the entire system for more than 2 hours. For this we put our thumbs up clearly, because in places we were already quite well above the specification.

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About the author

Igor Wallossek

Editor-in-chief and name-giver of igor'sLAB as the content successor of Tom's Hardware Germany, whose license was returned in June 2019 in order to better meet the qualitative demands of web content and challenges of new media such as YouTube with its own channel.

Computer nerd since 1983, audio freak since 1979 and pretty much open to anything with a plug or battery for over 50 years.

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