Sound Level Test Results
While everyone “hears” noise differently there is one easy way to remove all subjectivness and easily compare different fans: use a sound level meter. This way you can easily compare the various fans noise envelopes without us colouring the results and see what fans fit within your personal comfort level. Of course, we will endeavour to try and explain the various results – which are taken at a 15 inch distance from the GPU’s fan(s) – to help you gain an even better understanding of how loud a cooler’s stock fan is, but even if you discount our personal opinions, the fact remains numbers don’t lie.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Windows 7 desktop for 25 minutes and recorded the peak dB.
For Load tests, we ran Unigine’s Valley benchmark for 20 minutes and recorded the peak dB.
We knew it was a silent running card but these results did even surprise us. Remember the Decibel scale is logarithmic and a reduction of approximately 3dB is a halving of perceived noise levels, so a reduction of 6.7dB is a massive decrease in noise. Simply amazing is the only way to classify these results and this triple fan solution is as close to silent as you are going to find attached to factory high performance video card.
