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Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) 12GB Review

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 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

noise

The Nvidia reference coolers struggle to compete with modified partner solutions when it comes to noise emissions. The Titan X is no different, although I have to say I didn't find noise levels under load to be that intrusive – the pitch is quite low. We do test in a more ‘real world' environment however – we don't believe testing a graphics card in an open bench with a microphone 5 centimetres away is anything close to realistic.

We didn't notice any coil whine, even under synthetically exacerbated conditions.

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8 comments

  1. WINvidia or AMDream

    I may be inclined to getting two 1080’s before I ever get a Titan. o,O

  2. Clocks on your overclock seem a bit conservative – I’ve managed to hold a stable +235 core / 675 memory on both cards, giving me a base clock of 1655 and boost to 1770, with a memory clock of 1420, giving me 11300 effective.

    Final boost with their boost 3.0 puts me in the 2150-2180 core clock range. Can’t wait to stick waterblocks on them.

  3. and take the wife for supper , damn! 😉

  4. the joys of the silicon lottery I am afraid. I have recently got another Titan X, and it overclocks quite a bit higher.

  5. Yeah it seems I’ve gotten lucky – really lucky in fact, over the last few years. These tx-p’s of mine both top out near 2200 core / 11500 mem, my previous tx-maxwell’s could boost to a shade over 1550 core, and my 5960x can sustain 5.1ghz across all cores @ 1.42v, and I can push a single core to 5.6GHz. Feels like I get danmed lucky, a lot.

    Waterblocks for the tx-p’s have become a more complicated problem though – I was planning on going with EKWB for the setup, but it seems the nvidia HB sli bridge the pascal cards use won’t fit with their pascal blocks, so I’ll need another solution there.

  6. Christopher Lennon

    It’s kind of crazy to think that if you notice, it took in most cases until the Pascal Titan X and in others the 1080 to beat the 295×2 in a lot of benchmarks. Kind of neat that even if you bought the 295×2 at full retail of $1500USD (in the states) in took two years, a node shrink from 28nm to 16nm, and a Video Card costing $1200 to beat it in a lot of cases.

  7. Christopher Lennon

    Are they not benchmarking Doom in Vulkan?

  8. It’s neat that a single card with only around 70% of the shader cores can be equal in performance and consume half the power.

    The 295×2 was fast no doubt about it, but by no means was it particularly impressive. Hot as hell, and needed a beastly power supply to feed it. And thats without overclocking.