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Acoustics
Maybe Zotac is allowing those higher temperatures in a bid to attack acoustics though. In order to emphasize the noise each card makes, we stop all fans in the test system and take our measurement in a quiet room. Readings are collected two inches away from the card's rear I/O bracket.
The chart starts at 30 dB(A), which is the practical floor of what a human might consider silence. Given that the fans don’t even start to spin until Nvidia's GPU reaches 60 degrees, the noise levels at idle are essentially non-existent. Under load, the fans still don’t generate much audible noise. These are quiet graphics cards, to be sure.
What the graph fails to show is the brief spike when the fans first start up. They ramp up to a much higher RPM, generating quite a din for a second or two. Then, they throttle back to near-silence.