Temperatures

This is eight Gen 5 drives sitting idle in the adapter card.


Once we put a serious 50+ GB/s write load on the card, temperatures rise, but are still perfectly fine and quite far away from thermal throttling, actually.


Our thermal camera confirms that the card gets barely warm.

Fan Noise

The price that you pay for these low temperatures is lots of noise coming from the single fan on the Rocket 1608A.

To put things into perspective, I'll be comparing noise levels to a lineup of modern graphics cards, all measured at 50 cm distance using calibrated equipment.



There's no denying it, the HighPoint Rocket is VERY loud by current standards, even when sitting completely idle.

Our testing confirms that there is a temperature-based fan control mechanism, but the settings are terrible. There is no reason why the fan noise should be that high in idle or under load.