Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.


The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
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 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

For me this test is the deal breaker. The card is extremely noisy in both idle and load. I have never had a card that noisy on my test bench. Under no circumstances could I imagine myself using a system that noisy for longer periods of time.
Please note that the fans running at 12% already result in 41.9 dbA fan noise. Recent versions of the Catalyst Control Center offer fan speed adjustments, but only down to 20%. So if you use the CCC fan speed control feature your card will be even noisier in idle.

One way is to use RBE to modify the BIOS of each of the GPUs, but as we see later, there is not that much temperature headroom left to tune down the card to actually be a quiet experience.