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.

Idle fan noise is good; the card should almost be inaudible in that state.

I'm not impressed by gaming noise though. With 44 dbA, the card reaches noise levels close to those of recent noisy AMD releases. The GTX 780 Ti is a good deal quieter. Consider two very quiet (single GPU) GTX 760 cards in SLI for comparison: Two of those cards would probably be quieter than one ASUS MARS GTX 760 card.

Temperatures during gaming reach 78°C, so there is no headroom to quieten down the fan any further, as NVIDIA's driver will start reducing boost clocks as soon as the card reaches 80°C, which results in gradually reduced performance.