Fan Noise

In past years, gamers would accept everything for a little bit more performance. Nowadays, users are more aware of the fan noise and the power consumption of their graphics cards.

In order to properly test the fan noise that 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 system 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 noise levels are decent, almost quiet. You can barely hear the card when it is installed in a case.

During gaming, the card ends up very noisy, though. It matches the noise levels of AMD's 290X reference design using the uber BIOS, which is of no surprise as that's what PowerColor's BIOS seems to be based on, with a 30 MHz bump in GPU clock. So you will hear nothing but the fan's noise during gaming, which makes hearing enemy footsteps or similar sound effects impossible unless you play with headphones.

Overall, I am disappointed by the acoustic experience the R9 290X provides. AMD should have invested some time into developing a good cooler, like NVIDIA did with the GTX Titan.

Update: PowerColor just informed me that their retail cards will have both a quiet and a uber BIOS. Just like on the R9 290X reference design, the quiet BIOS is limited to 40% fan speed, resulting in lower noise at the cost of reduced performance. I tested noise levels of the quiet BIOS, and they are much improved indeed.