KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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. It isn’t a real world situation to be measuring with a case panel off only a few centimeters away from a video card. Our noise figures may therefore be lower than other publications who record at closer distances, or without a fully closed case muting the noise.
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 Refrigerator
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 very active under heavy load situations and can be clearly heard. It is a little louder than most of the high end solutions we have tested recently, but considering the cooling performance which we documented on the last page, we can live with a little extra noise. It would be possible to tweak the maximum fan speeds in software so you aren't forced to live with this.
It’s a great card for performance and some light future-proofing… At the cost of about $700 and tax… that is hard money to justify, unless you know you will not regret it. Again, the price is probably the only ‘con’ but at the same time, it is difficult to justify the high price as a con, when this is a company’s flagship device we are talking about. If anything, I am just glad it didn’t start at a price much closer to the Titan (for how it performs, compared to the GTX 780)… that is just $300 dollars way north of the 780 Ti (or $600 if its SLI).
Hard to go wrong with one of these.