NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Founders Edition Review: Between Value and Decadence - When Price is Not Everything | Page 18

Let’s now get to the consequences of the graphics card warming. Of course I’m interested in the noise level of what is now emitted as complex fan noise. Whether closed or not, the temperature curves look very similar. The board in the closed construction still acts very sovereign, whereby the speeds of 1400 rpm remain really bearable.

By the way, the curve shows the fan above the CPU and the one at the back rotating a little bit faster. I have experimented a bit and the only slightly lower speeds are chosen in such a way that there can be no modulation phenomena when intermodulation suddenly produces audible mixed products that remind you of the oscillating noise of propeller engines. I could not find any other reason.

Let us now come to the noise level and the sound character. With about 39.5 dB at Witcher 3 in UHD and a power consumption of a good 360 watts, I measured a pleasantly low value, which you can still perceive very clearly, but which is far from the 41.9 dB(A) of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Slightly more than 2 dB difference is already an announcement. The sound characteristic mixes a noise with the rather low frequency engine noise, which is very broadband. The bearing noises produce a kind of slight peak at approx. 63 Hz. Nevertheless you can live with it, because it is not easy to control a card with 360 watts of waste heat.

But I do not want to conceal the extreme case. If you use Furmark or heavy GPGPU scenarios, where the memory and voltage converters are also more demanding, then it’s still a good 360 watts, but the fan speeds go slightly above 2000 rpm and the noise level is then a whopping 43.3 dB(A). However, I have not been able to do this for games. Seen in this light, the world is then also in order again.