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.

Just like AMD, ASUS put a dual-BIOS feature on the card, which lets you toggle between a high-performance and quiet BIOS.

Idle fan noise is exactly the same as the AMD reference design. It would have been easy to improve a bit here, which would have made users who also use the PC for work or other non-gaming tasks happy.

Using the "performance" BIOS, gaming noise levels are considerably improved over the AMD board, being roughly on the same level as AMD's "quiet" mode BIOS, and that without penalizing performance. Switch to the quiet BIOS on the ASUS R9 290X DC II OC and the card runs very quietly for a R9 290X. While it still can't match the quietest GTX 780 Ti cards, 32 dBA while gaming is a very good result. What's even better is that the quiet BIOS doesn't do so by sacrificing performance, with both the quiet and performance BIOS on the ASUS R9 290X delivering the same frame rates in games. You basically have the choice between higher temperatures at reduced noise levels or lower temperatures with more noise. Temperatures with the quiet BIOS are the same 94°C we've seen on the AMD reference design, which may be a bit on the high side, but is, in my opinion, still acceptable. The performance BIOS only reaches 78°C under load.