Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Ti Gaming OC review - Graphics Card Acoustic Levels

Acoustic Levels

When graphics cards generate a lot of heat, the heat must be removed from the hot core as quickly as feasible. Often, you'll find large active fan systems that do an excellent job of dissipating heat, but all the fans on modern computers make them a noisy son of a pistol. Bear in mind that the test e administer is subjective. We use a certified dBA meter and will begin recording the number of dBA generated by the PC. You may be wondering why this is subjective. As there is always background noise from the streets, an HDD, the PSU or CPU fan, and so on, this is an approximate measurement by a mile or two. Only in a sound test chamber could objective measurements be made. At various frequencies, the human hearing system exhibits varying degrees of sensitivity. This means that the impression of noise is not constant across the frequency spectrum. Significant recorded levels (in dB) of noise at high or low frequencies will be less irritating than noise with its energy focused in the intermediate frequencies. In other words, recorded noise levels in decibels will not accurately reflect how loud the noise is perceived by humans. That is why we take the dBA reading. A circuit is added to the sound level meter to compensate for this idea. This value represents the noise level in decibels (dBA). The letter A is appended to show that the measurement was corrected. The A-weighting attenuates frequencies below 1 kHz and above 6 kHz, while amplifying frequencies between 1 kHz and 6 kHz.

Acoustic Levels at 40cm

The graphics card turns down the fans in passive mode, thus in desktop idle situations. This is called fan-STOP. When a card is in "IDLE" mode and has fan stop, we'll stop the listing of cards. They don't make any noise at all. 

At Q (silent) BIOS mode, you'll hover at a comfy 37 DBa, the Performance (OC) BIOS mode however is noisier with acoustics, it's still very acceptable though.