AMD Radeon R7 265 2GB Video Card Review with Sapphire Dual-X R7 265
Temperature & Noise Testing
Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the Sapphire Radeon R7 265 with the Dual-X GPU cooler.
Sapphire Dual-X R7 265 OC 2GB Idle Temperature:
Sapphire Dual-X R7 265 OC 2GB Gaming Temperature:
The Sapphire Dual-X R7 265 OC 2GB graphics card was found to idle at 26C with the fan spinning at 1120 RPMs. It should be noted that the ambient room temperature was 16.0C (65F). The Sapphire Dual-X R7 265 hit 55C with the fans running at 2098 RPM when gaming for an extended period of time.
The AMD Radeon R7 260X 2GB and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti w/ BOOST are both reference cards with reference GPU coolers on them. The AMD Radeon R7 265 2GB uses the custom Sapphire Dual-X GPU cooler, so performance should be much better and it is.
Sound Testing
We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.
The Sapphire Radeon R7 265 2GB graphics card with the Dual-X cooler was very quiet at idle and when gaming it only hit 44.3dB, which is excellent. You shouldn’t be able to hear this card if you have a gaming case that is loaded with a bunch of fans. Sapphire has done a good job on their custom coolers and the Dual-X design has been around for years and is a tried and true design.