Abstract Studies of surface brightness fluctuations in the intracluster medium present an indirect probe of turbulent properties such as the turbulent velocities, injection scales, and the slope of the power spectrum of fluctuations toward smaller scales. With the advancement of Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) studies and surveys relative to X-ray observations, we seek to investigate surface brightness fluctuations in a sample of South Pole Telescope (SPT)-SZ clusters which also have archival XMM-Newton data. Here we present a pilot study of two typical clusters in that sample: SPT-CLJ0232-4421 and SPT-CLJ0638-5358. We infer injection scales larger than 500 kpc in both clusters and Mach numbers ≈ 0.5 in SPT-CLJ0232-4421 and Mach numbers ≈ 0.6–1.6 in SPT-CLJ0638-5358, which has a known shock. We find hydrostatic bias values for M 500 less than 0.2 for SPT-CLJ0232-4421 and less than 0.1 for SPT-CLJ0638-5358. These results show the importance to assess quantitative values via a detailed multiwavelength approach and suggest that the drivers of turbulence may occur at quite large scales.