Thermal Camera & Fan Noise Recording
In this section, we bring you an audio-visual representation of the card's thermals and noise output. The video below is a recording of the card in both idle and load, while independent instruments log audio, thermal-imaging, optical video, and numeric sensor data in real time. We put together a new rig with a passively cooled Core "Haswell" processor and ASUS TUF Sabertooth motherboard to make it possible. We also used ASUS's Thermal Armor kit with the motherboard to ensure that heat from the motherboard doesn't obscure our thermal imaging. Our instruments include a FLIR-made thermal camera with a resolution of 320x240 pixels, a normal optical camera, a sensitive shotgun microphone, and GPU-Z, to log the GPU's sensor data.
The thermal camera also serves as a non-contact thermometer. Its crosshairs are trained on the graphics card and will dynamically follow the highest temperature. The audio portion of the video is only to illustrate the tonal quality and the relative change from idle to load, not the absolute volume produced. It is to give you an idea of how the card revs its fans up as a reaction to increasing temperatures.
We let the card sit in idle for around half an hour before starting the video recording. The first few seconds show the fans at a full stop, which is STRIX's normal operating mode for when the card is not under load.
We start by putting a load on the card at around timecode 0:19, and you can, if you really concentrate, hear a little bit of coil noise from that point on, but it is very light and should barely be noticeable once the card has been installed into a case.
Once temperatures have increased enough (beyond 65°C), the fans will start spinning. A bit quick at first to handle the heat, fan noise will go down as temperatures drop.
Near the end of the video, the thermal camera shows that the voltage regulation circuitry stays below 100°C, which is a bit high, but completely acceptable for such a card.