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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 Asus GTX760 Direct CU Mini disappointed me a little in regards to the acoustics performance. It was the loudest card on test today, peaking around 36-37dBA under heavy, extended load. The Asus HD7850 and Sapphire HD7950 on the other hand were very quiet.
The 760 mini is lovely – really nice idea, if a little expensive.
The cards are good, but the cooler on the 760 is too small to really be that good for such a high end board – I would rather get a case that can take a full sized GPU, even if it was small, like a prodigy.
Too bad my three month old Asus 7850 DCUII V2 can’t even reach any core clock over 960mhz without crashing while in a game. Touched nothing but the core clock and 5% power addition.
1000mhz ran fine on tests. rock solid on 3Dmark11 and MSI kompressor though. Could be a driver issue, could be a bad card. Clean install though.
Still, goes to show that overclocking is not absolutely dependable.