Gigabyte G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 980 4GB Review

Noise Levels

The noise levels produced by a graphics card is an increasingly important consideration for PC users and Gamers these days. While fan noise is unlikely to ruin the gaming experience, no one likes a noisy graphics card and no one will argue with the fact that quieter is better. Many users are willing to sacrifice temperatures to gain a silence advantage, but with better cooling solutions being developed it is increasingly common to be able to get both better cooling and better acoustic performance than a reference solution on most custom cooled graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD partners. That said both AMD and Nvidia have stepped up their game too with regards to acoustics on their reference coolers. Ultimately, acoustics will always be a big deciding factor when there is often very little differentiation between graphics cards using the same GPUs. To acquire the noise levels of graphics cards in our benchmarks we run three different load scenarios for 5 minutes and take an acoustic reading using our decibel meter at the end of those load scenarios. The measurement is taken approximately 30cm horizontally away from the graphics card and the CPU fan is disabled and other background noise minimised to reduce interference. The three load scenarios are desktop idle, Furmark load and Unigine Heaven load. The reading in Unigine Heaven is always taken in the first scene of the sequence after one loop is completed.

Noise isn’t a strong point of the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980. 600W of cooling capacity requires lots of fans and when you start to hit those temperatures in the mid 60s and low 70s the fans really ramp up hard. The fan profile is aggressive and the result is fairly noisy under extreme loads but under typical gaming loads it produces about the same level of noise as a stock GTX 780 Ti which is actually not too bad.