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 OC | Asus GTX 590 | Einhell 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.
Kommentieren