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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.
Thermal results were very impressive, and noise levels follow suit – the 2060 FE peaked at just over 41dB, putting it right in the mix with other aftermarket solutions we have tested recently.
It's not the absolute quietest card we've ever tested, sure, but we do have to remember this is a card Nvidia has manufactured itself – if you look up the chart and find the GTX 1060, you can see that runs almost 4dB louder, so Nvidia's designs have improved massively from the previous generation. I would say manufacturers like ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte have their work cut-out for making custom RTX 2060 cards.
