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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 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 quiet. It never has to work too hard thanks to the cool running Maxwell architecture. You can barely hear the card when it is running, which is welcomed.
OK you tested the card but at the beginning of the review you talk about improvements to reduce coil whine and during the entire test you didn’t even make a specific test to verify the OcUK claims of reduced coil whine. This is the first review from Kitguru I’ve read that I deem to be incomplete. If you want a good testing scenario for coil whine I’ve got an easy one for you that works every time. Just let me know.
Instead of coil whine, we ended up with comment whine.
Well don’t you think they should have tested it specifically for that reason?
Nice review. I got this Card yesterday and put in my rig. What a great Quality. I overclock the gpu to 1200 MHz and the mem to 1900 MHz. Only set the limit in MSI afterburner from 100 to 106. With those settings, it boost to 1420 MHz on core. You Guys have 84 MHz more on the gpu and only boost to 1411Mhz ? Why..?