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 the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes.
As with our temperature testing, the MSI 2080 SUPER is marginally louder than the 2070 SUPER model we looked at a couple of weeks ago, but with a peak reading of less than 39dB it is still a fantastically quiet card. By the time it is installed in a case – we test using an open-air bench – the fans would be essentially inaudible.