MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning review - Heat levels | Noise level

Graphics card cooler performance examined

Let's have a look at the temperatures the reference based custom cooler offers.

We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming intensely and continuously, we literally stress the GPUs 100% here, as you can see in the graph.

Below an overview of peak / maximum measured temperatures in comparison with other cards. These temperatures with your average game will typically be lower.

This card ran roughly 35 degrees C in IDLE which is fantastic. When the GPU is stressed out 100% for several minutes the card only reaches roughly 73 degrees C. For a GeForce GTX 480 these are just great numbers as that's 17degrees C below reference temperatures.

The card is much less warm compared to the reference model, even despite a higher default GPU voltage and the factory overclock at 750 MHz. We measure at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius.

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 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 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

There are a lot of differences in measurements amongst websites. Some even place the DBa meter 10cm away from the card. Considering that's not where you ear is located, we do it our way. 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 a PC in a real-world situation.

The end result is good alright, roughly 42 DBa of noise is coming from the PC once we really stress the GPU. This is a very normal PC audio level. Not annoying, just normal. When the card is in idle (desktop mode) you won't even hear it  ....