PowerColor Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB
Temperature Testing & Overclocking
Temperature Testing
Our findings here were consistent with the HIS that we had tested before. The core closer to the fan was cooler despite only having an aluminum heatsink, while the core nearer to the exhaust had higher temperatures. This issue was non-existent for the GeCube, which had a cooler fan for each core but for the reference model, it does seem like this is the norm. Fortunately, the 70 odd degrees Celsius that we found were not distressingly warm. However be mindful that our air-conditioned test lab has an average temperature of about 21 degrees Celsius and you could fare much worse than us if you're in a tropical environment.
Overclocking
The meager amount of overclocking that we managed on the PowerColor turned out to have quite the anti-climatic result, with one 3DMark06 score that was actually lower than the default clock speed. This showed that our overclocking did not really affect performance significantly and looking at the minimal improvement shown by the even more overclocked GeCube, overclocking by this kind of magnitude really doesn't seem worthwhile.