Performance

We tested the Morpheus on the same system we use for our VGA reviews. Temperatures were measured the same way as in our VGA review, with a stressful game, not Furmark.

Since the fans on the Morpheus do not connect to the graphics card's fan headers, there is no GPU based temperature control for the fans. They will always run at the same speed unless you use a fan controller that has a thermal probe you can manually place near the graphics processor.

When I hooked the fans up to our ASUS motherboard, I realized that this is not the way to go. ASUS has extremely limited fan control settings that don't go below 50%, which is still way too high for the fans on our Morpheus. After realizing the limitation, ASUS's fault, I bought a simple linear voltage fan controller to perform our testing. So, depending on your motherboard, you'll also have to buy a fan controller to set the fans to a speed that makes sense for your configuration.



First, I looked at the temperatures depending on fan speed. As you can see, even the lowest setting that made the fans spin (5V) greatly improved temperatures over the AMD reference design, which runs at aroung 95°C with the stock cooler. You can see temperatures drop as voltage increases. The biggest gains take place at up to around 7V. As the next graph shows, the gains beyond 7V are relatively small and not very useful to daily usage.



Instead of measuring temperature, we now measured noise levels at the same voltages as before. Compared to the AMD reference design, the Morpheus is quieter at any setting, including 12V.

Looking at the data, I would say that a good voltage range for our fans is 5 to 7 Volts, which provides great noise levels while still keeping temperatures low. Anything faster and the fans will just get too noisy without providing enough of a drop in temperatures. Remember that there is no temperature-based fan speed control: your fans will always run at the same speed, no matter whether the card is sitting idle at the desktop or churning through a game at full throttle.

Depending on the fans used, the range might differ. Our data conclusively shows that there is no point in getting high-powered, high-speed fans for the Morpheus. You should instead look for fans that are as quiet as possible, even if they don't move as much air. Another benefit of such fans would be that you can run them at a higher voltage while still being relatively quiet, and they won't stop spinning if voltage is too low.