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Dangerous Liaisons - temperatures of the graphics card
Galaxy threw the reference cooler away and went for a Zalman cooler. Now these things do not only make the cards much cooler, but they do have one other gigantic advantage .. they are extremely silent. Seriously you will not hear this thing at all. But the temperatures .. aaah .. they are great !
Card | Temperature in idle (Celsius) | Temperature at 100% load in (Celsius) |
GeForce 7300 GS Galaxy | 40 | 50 |
GeForce 7600 GS Galaxy | 40 | 53 |
GeForce 7600 GT | 39 | 65 |
GeForce 7900 GT | 42 | 68 |
GeForce 7900 GTX | 44 | 73 |
Let's have a look at the temperatures of a selection of series 7 cards compared with this Zalman cooler.
A maximum 50 Degrees C peak temperature was monitored at the 7300 GT, a really great score.
49 Degrees when it's peaking .. not bad huh ?
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
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 |
GeForce 7300 GT Galaxy |
Bedroom at night |
30 dBA |
Quiet |
Broadcast studio |
20 dBA |
|
Rustling leaves |
10 dBA |
Barely audible |
We startup a benchmark, we take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card.
We measure roughly 40 dBa on the PC with a Galaxy 7300 GT with the Zalman cooler, which is to be considered a quiet noise level coming from the PC. Again, this is a very subjective test. Nonetheless it's a very good outcome for NVIDIA though as that's a really acceptable level for all cards.