Unigine Valley 1.0 Benchmark

Publisher: Unigine

Unigine's free Valley 1.0 benchmarking tool is incredibly taxing on the GPU whilst placing the CPU under very little stress, making it a great indicator of pure GPU grunt. It should also, therefore, be repeatable for most users running half decent systems.

We run the full benchmark at 2,560 x 1,600,with Ultra detail. The strongly coloured bars show the results at what we would consider the most sensible settings - with the case opening uncovered and with the fan in either 40% or 55% mode. The blue bar shows the result from a cold start.

Noise

We measured the noise generated by the fan of each GPU using a decibel meter pointed at the side panel of the system at a distance of 30cm. The ambient noise level with the system off was 38dB. The fans of both the 290X and GTX 780 idled at 20% according to GPU-Z.

Heat

The 290X is designed to run at 95C so it theoretically shouldn't waver from this temperature when under load. However, we took a temperature reading of the GPU anyway to see how it compared to the GTX 780. As ever we have calculated this as a Delta relative to the ambient room temperature, which on this day was 26C.