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 how much noise a card's fan emits, we use a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound-level meter (~$4,000). It has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.
The tested graphics card is installed in a system that does not emit any noise on its own, using a passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard, and a 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 is conducted at a distance of 100 cm and 160 cm off the floor. Ambient background noise inside 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 since a 6 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 are tested with a stressful game, not with Furmark.
Idle fan noise is fantastic as the card completely turns its fans off in idle (up to 60°C).
The thermal solution isn't taxed by as much since the RX 470 board produces less heat, which helps avoid the high noise levels we saw with the RX 480. Unfortunately, ASUS decided to go for a very low GPU temperature, which results in terrible fan noise considering the card's performance.
The numbers of the reference design card are quite good, though, with only 30 dBA and the same cooler that ran 41 dBA on the RX 480, which has me hope that custom designs from other board vendors will be much quieter than the ASUS board we have for review.
126
