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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 cooler is certainly far from the best we have tested. While the dBa rating is not too high at the default settings, there is a quite annoying pitch, inherent with all of the small AMD fans built into their reference coolers. Nvidia can build their reference coolers well, but AMD have always struggled.
The cooler on both R9 290 and R9 290x is disappointing.
The price is great, but the cooler is certainly not……. waiting to see modified versions soon
The prices are hard to ignore, and its good to see Nvidia dropping prices lately too, they had been overcharging for quite some time now
I always wondered why they didn’t use a version of the HD7990 cooler. would have made more sense instead of something they probably used on a HD7850
Please, get rid of Furmark. It’s meant to stress GPUs at the max temperature before they are permanentely damaged. Nvidia drivers detect when Furmark is running and throttle their cards, so these results are biased. Measure real world power comsumption and temperature from games that are driven by different types of workloads – Rome: Total War 2, L4D 2, Battlefield 4 and GTA.
Hi Bob, it has never damaged any GPU in the years we have used it. and we only use it to supplement the temperatures from testing games.
I got AMD Radeon R9 290.. and it works great.. All games max graphics.. 😀 Thanks much