This means that under normal circumstances, you can slightly hear the product over the regular PC noise. MSI Radeon HD 6850 - We measured a 39 dBA when the GPU is massively under stress. Roughly the same proximity you'll have a PC in a real-world situation. Considering that's not where you ear is located, we do it our way.įor each dBA test we close the PC/chassis and move the dBA gun 75 cm away from the PC. Some even place the dBA meter 10cm away from the card. There's a lot of differences in measurements amongst websites. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two an imprecise measurement. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible.
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card We measure at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius.Ībove, a chart of this particular test with some comparative materials thrown in there.