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We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.
We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa.
Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
The move to a three fan, dual heatsink cooler has paid dividends for AMD. This is an exceptionally quiet cooler, silent when idle and barely audible when gaming. To be fair, I think the Titan cooler is exceptionally good too, but it is a little louder under load.
A lot of cash, but when factoring in the performance characteristics it seems good value compared to Nvidia parts.
It just shows how far ahead the Titan is – its single GPU and not really that far behind the Malta card.
Their partners ruined the launch by releasing a HD7990 many months ago. good improvement over their cards however but it seems so late to the game after Nvidia had the Titan out a while ago, and its single GPU.
I dont buy any dual GPU cards as the driver profiles are so important to get the most from it. at least with the titan it will be 100% all the time.
two titans in SLI would be much faster than this!
@ Indloon – of course two titans would be faster, but they would also cost £1,700! you would need two of these malta cards at the same price for that price analogy to be effective.
CF this and compare with the crash-happy-result-CF-unofficial-7990 test you reviewed before.
I can’t help but not fall in love with this card every time I look at it, I see people talking about 2x titans in SLI are better, Obviously they would be better but the VRAM doesn’t stack that 12GB of power would = 6GB of effective Bandwidth on the cards sadly if you SLI….
this 7990 has 6GB and is half the price… Also you know the 7970 has a better 3D graphics rating than the titan? oh you didn’t know that? did you know that 2x 7970 in CF has more Power than a 690? same thing Duel GPU (expensive one) vs 2x single GPU’s will Always lose.
But its always in AMD’s favor since they don’t put 200-300% markups on all there cards thats why I buy AMD.
G