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We take our noise measurements with the sound meter positioned 1 foot from the graphics card. I measured the noise floor to be 32 dBA, thus anything above this level can be attributed to the graphics cards. The power supply is passive for the entire power output range we tested all graphics cards in, while all CPU and system fans were disabled. A reading under load comes from running Cyberpunk 2077 for 30 minutes.
The real victory however, is that this Noctua Edition card is not only significantly cooler running, but also much quieter too. For the Performance BIOS, the fans spun at 950rpm, and that dropped to 850rpm for the Quiet mode. As you can see, I’ve got both readings measured at 32Ba on this chart, but honestly we are actually just running into the noise floor of my testing office. I live in London and environmental noise is fairly high, so even with my PC off I am not seeing noise levels drop below 32dBa on the sound meter. In an anechoic chamber, I would expect to see actual GPU noise readings significantly lower for the Noctua card, but for me, this is as close to silent as it is ever going to get.
To help illustrate the differences in noise levels, I did record a sound test which can you find in the video on the first page of this review.
