Sound Levels

In order to give a measurement of how loud this board is, we used an IEC651 Type II sound level meter on the dbA slow setting.

The distance between fan and sound level meter was 10cm. Please note that this is very little, compared to the "standard" measurements, which are made at 1m distance. We had to do this, to get proper readings with our sound level meter, because we obviously can't spend thousands of dollars on audio measuring equipment.
All tested fans were connected to an external 12V lab PSU. 12V is the maximum rated fan speed. Some motherboards/video cards use slower fan speeds and slowly ramp them up with temperatures. This is also the reason, why the X800 series seems to have such a "loud" fan. During normal usage its fan is usually running at 33% to 66%.