EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 08/19/2012 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

Graphics card noise levels

Graphics card noise levels

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. Do remember that the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought 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 an imprecise 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. Frequencies below 1 kHz and above 6 kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1 kHz and 6 kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

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 sstudio	20 dBA
Rustling leaves	10 dBA	Barely audible

There's a lot of differences in measurements amongst websites. Some even place the dBA meter 10 cm away from the card. Considering that's not where your ear is located, we do it our way.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC

For each dBA test we close the PC/chassis and move the dBA gun 75 cm away from the PC. Roughly the same proximity you'll have from a PC in a real-world situation. Above, the IDLE (desktop mode) results where the GPU hardly has to do anything. The Idle results are brilliant, the fan will even turn itself off when the GPU idles.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC

For the card in a fully stressed status (in-game) 39 dBA, now that simply is silent. So if you do not tweak the card or something, during gaming you can expect a silent card.

26 pages « < 8 9 10 11 next »

EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost SC edition review
In this article we review the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost SC edition review with that SC for superclocked. The product is fairly reference looking but does come with EVGA's own styled cooler, it has 2GB of memory with both that memory and the core baseclock slightly overclocked quite significant.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC review
We review the EVGA GeForce GTX 660 SC aka SuperClocked edition. as the name implies it is already factory overclocked for you with a 1046 MHz baseclock that can boost towards 1111 MHz.

EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti SC review
We have another GeForce GTX 660 Ti review for you today as we'll put the GeForce GTX 660 Ti from EVGA to the test, it's their factory clocked version, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti SuperClocked (SC) version.So it isn't hard to understand that the factory overclocked GeForce 660 Ti SKUs will run fairly close to the GeForce GTX 670 (reference clocked) and maybe Let's have a peek.

EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified with EVBOT review
We'll test the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Classified today. A product that is 100% customized from PCB to cooling. Software voltage regulation works, but obviously as well is limited to that 1.175V. EVGA however does have an alternative for the Classified model as tested today, you can hook up a small piece of hardware to it called EVBot, which controls the voltages directly at hardware level, and thus bypassing the NVAPI software limitation. 1400 MHz, here we come.