When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

We tested all cards on dBA levels. Obviously the reference coolers all perform roughly the same. The customized coolers are either louder or softer depending on what they try to achieve.

• So in IDLE mode, you will not hear the card. We measure less than 38 DBa coming from the PC.
• Gaming with an average title not stressing the GPU too much we can hear the fan a little, we measure roughly 40 DBa.
• When we loop 3DMark Vantage for a while the GPU really heats up, as side-effect the fan RPM will go up even higher, the noise-levels are now 42-44 DBa which definitely is quite hearable, overall these results are okay, really.

The core temperature

Let's have a look at the temperatures this huge cooler offers.

So pretty much we fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would mid-gaming, we literally stress the GPU 100% here. We measured at a set 21 Degrees C room-temperature.

Now a couple of things are interesting here. First of you an see the P-states we discussed earlier, these will save you energy. In 2D mode the GPU tries to save power by lowering clocks & voltages, therefore running at a much lower core frequency. The minute we fire off our shader application at the GPU the 3D mode activates and sets the default clocks to what they should be.

In idle you can expect a temperature of 45-50 Degrees C. Pretty normal. Yet once we push the GPU to 100%, the temperatures take a pretty hefty toll and settle at ~75 Degrees C. This fine.

Though always make sure you PC chassis is very well ventilated.