Fan Noise

In past years, users would accept everything for a little bit more performance. Nowadays, users are more aware of the fan noise and the power consumption of their graphic cards.

In order to properly test the fan noise that a card emits, we use the Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.


The tested graphics card was installed in a system that was completely passively cooled. That is, passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard, and on a solid state drive.

This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified), the measurement was conducted at 100 cm of distance and at 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room was well below 20 dBA for all measurements. Please note that the dBA scale is not linear but logarithmic. 40 dBA is not twice as loud as 20 dBA. A 3 dBA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing perception is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dBA increase doubles the perceived sound level. The 3D load noise levels were tested with a stressful game, not with Furmark.

Idle fan noise is great, but even the HD 7970 GHz Edition was very quiet in idle.
Under load, the fan runs pretty fast and ends up "not so quiet". It's not really noisy, especially not when you compare the results to some other AMD cards in our test group. On the other hand, recent NVIDIA cards, especially the NVIDIA ASUS DC II series, have shown massive improvements in fan noise. With those cards, whisper quiet high-end gaming is possible, something that is not the case with the HD 7970 Matrix.

ASUS tells me that their engineers deliberately included an extra-large temperature safety margin for overclocking and overvolting. Our numbers later in this review show that this margin is way too high. Even overclocked and overvolted, the card does not run hotter than 75°C. Another 10°C would be no problem for the card, and would also result in much better noise levels.