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 Time Spy stress test for 30 minutes.
Unfortunately for Palit, the slightly lacking thermal performance can't be explained by the fact the fans run very slowly. In fact, the fans actually spin up rather fast, hitting 1960rpm in Performance mode. That led to fairly audible noise from those fans, registering 44dBa on our sound meter – it's not Vega 64 levels of noise, but it's not quiet either.
The Silent BIOS does improve on this, reducing fan speeds to 1650rpm, but it is hardly ‘silent' as the name implies. We saw 41dBa on the sound meter using that BIOS, meaning it is still 1dBa louder than the RTX 3090 Eagle OC.