Noise levels
Noise levels
With a certified dBA meter, we measure how many dBA originate from the PC. It's slightly subjective as 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. Take this measurement as an indication, not a precise measurement please.
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 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz 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 studio | 20 dBA | |
Rustling leaves | 10 dBA | Barely audible |
But let's have a peek at noise levels. We take a DBa gun and point it at the working PC and take a distance of 75 CM. The PC again, is stressed at 3300 MHz on the CPU with 80% RPM. These as such are noise levels measured under heavy CPU load:
So as you can see, the cooler with it's fan regulated a little reproduces excellent noise levels. Due to the manual fan controller you can obviously adjust noise to completely silent, or somewhat noisy at the cost/benefit of performance, your call.
Fan Regulation LOW-MED-HIGH
There's one more chart I'd like to show you. For this test we remain at an 3800 MHz overclock as that is a sweet spot with this cooler. But now we show you the FAN RPM set at low, medium and high. As such you can observe performance in temperature based on RPM preference of the fan controller and the respective DBa levels. Setting that fan RPM at half/medium seems the sweet spot for good cooling versus low noise levels.