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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
As we discussed on the last page, the fans on the Palit GTX970 JetStream don't actually activate until the core is loaded to around 68c. Depending on the ambient temperatures and the load demand of the game engine, there are times when the fans don't actually spin at all. This is the only GTX970 we have tested that does this. Games such as Tomb Raider however push the Maxwell GPU hard – and the fans will spin. It varies from game to game.
While this card is extremely quiet when gaming, the adverse side effect is a climb in temperatures under load – it is always running hotter than the ASUS or MSI GTX970 cards (see previous page for more details on this).
Personally I feel Palit have got the balance slightly wrong – I would have preferred slightly cooler running temperatures because the difference in real world noise levels between 28 dBa and 32 dBa is not that noticeable at all. Again if you value the lowest noise levels then the hotter running temperatures may not be that big a deal.
Seems to be a nice card
Especially that it is priced significantly cheaper than other brands.
“you need to buy a full sized HDMI adapter” – when I bought mine early-Jan 2015, it comes with a mini-to-full HDMI adapter in the box.