Fan Noise

In past years, gamers would accept everything for a little bit more performance. Nowadays, users are more aware of their graphics card's fan noise and power consumption.

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


The tested graphics card was installed in a system that was completely cooled passively. That is, passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, and passive cooling on the motherboard and solid state drive. Noise results of other cards on this page are measurements of the respective reference design.

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 a distance of 100 cm and 160 cm off the floor. Ambient background noise 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, as 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. 3D load noise levels were tested with a stressful game, not with Furmark.

PowerColor includes a "quiet" and a "performance" BIOS with their card. Both provide the same performance, so we only included one result in our performance charts. For noise testing, we tested both BIOSes separately.

The noise levels in idle are pretty much the same as those of the AMD reference design. Some improvement here would be nice and easy to achieve as the card runs comfortably cool in that state.

With 47 dBA during gaming, the performance BIOS is clearly too noisy, even though it improves a little bit over the reference design. I'd still consider it too noisy for daily gaming. The quiet BIOS does much better here, delivering very good noise levels for a R9 290X. In quiet mode, the card emits less noise than the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X, but ASUS DC II OC is still the quietest R9 290X in quiet mode.

Overall, I would have wished for more noise improvements considering this card uses a triple-slot cooler, which provides much better cooling potential. Especially the quiet BIOS should have been quieter by allowing for slightly higher temperatures.