When graphics cards produce a lot of heat usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. 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. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bough a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. 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 not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. 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. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.

	TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS Jet takeoff (200 feet) 120 dBA   Construction Site 110 dBA Intolerable Shout (5 feet) 100 dBA   Heavy truck (50 feet) 90 dBA Very noisy Urban street 80 dBA   Automobile interior 70 dBA Noisy Normal conversation (3 feet) 60 dBA   Office, classroom 50 dBA Moderate Living room 40 dBA   Bedroom at night 30 dBA Quiet Broadcast studio 20 dBA   Rustling leaves 10 dBA Barely audible

What about sound then. Since the Peltier needs a additional wattage it'll not only take heat from the GPU, it'll create heat as well. Through the heatpipes towards the cooling ribbons two fans are rotation and they make a LOT of noise.

Now the specs mention three rotational fan speeds (automated), yet the reality is that the minute I turned on the PC both fans started rotating at 100% consistently with no change at all, even at idle. So much noise that I decided to measure it ...

We startup a benchmark, we take the dBA meter, move away 50 to 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card.

We measured roughly 50 DBa to 54 DBa which is to be considered a very moderate noise level coming from the PC. This is a very subjective test but the high pitch noise the fans make are simply irritating.

On the topic of sound .. the manual and website mentions also that the cooler also has a fail safe built in. When the fans fail an alarm should beep. We manually halted both fans simultaneous with no result, thus no beep or anything.