We take our noise measurements with the sound meter positioned 1 foot from the graphics card. I measured the sound floor to be 34 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 the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes.
With such a large cooler (relatively speaking, at least) for this GTX 1660 Ti, not only are temperatures very low – but noise levels are also very impressive. The Gaming OC 6G isn't quite as quiet as the MSI Gaming X, but the difference is just 0.6dB – and was imperceptible to my ear. In a nutshell, it's another dead quiet card – as soon as it is put in a case, chances are you won't be able to hear it when gaming.