Acoustics
The acoustic performance of 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 noise 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.
Find details of our acoustic methodology on page 3.
When I was reading your introduction I was a little surprised to see the blue PCB because the one we’ve just tested had a black PCB. I had no idea there were two revisions but you cleared that up quite nicely in the conclusion. Just goes to show I don’t jump to the closing thoughts first and ignore all your other hard work.
Super important thing to mention – Gigabyte has 2 revisions of the GTX760. REV1 witch is what we see here features the blue PCB with a 3 heatpipe cooling solution while REV2 features a Black PCB and a 2 heatpipe solution.