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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 large dual fans don't generate a lot of noise. When idle they spin around 1,100rpm and when gaming this increases to around 1,500 rpm. Under Furmark load they peak at around 1,750 rpm.
Love this card, but its still a bit rich for my blood. are they doing this with the GTX 770?
thats a crazy OC for such a high end board.
I love the nvidia boards in this generation, but they are all so expensive. im still looking at getting a 760 as I only game at 1080p. think its enough. waiting on the ti version if there is one coming out soon
Great review, but for under half the price I would recommend getting a GTX 760. I got one last week and it’s a great card for around the £210 mark.
Great review.
I wish you guys would actually find a truly STABLE overclock. Just like everyone else you get a clock speed that’s stable for a 10-minute benchmark, but not for real-world games. It’s misleading and people who buy and overclock the card are disappointed to find that truly stable clocks are much lower than those in reviews. I haven’t seen anyone across all GTX 780 threads get a truly stable core clock above 1040MHz, even for the water cooled custom ones. You should really run intensive games for 3-5 hours to get your overclocking results, and you’ll see they are nowhere near as good as you thought.
I played a few games on it for hours and it was stable at 1040mhz (no artifacting on memory or core and no hard locks etc). Its only misleading if people think that every graphics card in that particular range will hit those speeds, but they don’t as we mention in many reviews and I hope our audience know from 3 years of reviews here that every card can deliver VERY different results. Same as when you are overclocking processors.
We attempt to make everything as transparent as possible.
I bought one of these and the card is stable at 1204mhz with a 200mhz boost on the memory (couldnt get the memory overclock they achieved to become stable) but this clock speed was playable through the first half of crysis 3 (got tired of the game after a few hours) Then played borderlands 2 for a few more hourse. I finished off my testing with some fur-mark burn in tests to insure stability (2 hour burn in test). My room did get quite a bit warmer during this gaming period, but my window was open and outside was cold. The temps held steady at 73-76 Celsius for most of the duration of testing with the max temp being 77 degrees Celsius.