The noise emitted by a video card’s cooling system is able to greatly increase the overall system noise output. Since it is an important aspect of a card’s performance, we tested each video card to see which solution was the most efficient in terms of noise output. The tests conducted on this page were done using the following methods:

Noise Test: We tested using a noise meter, the ML80 Lafayette, placed a distance of 10 centimeters from the video card’s fan. The fan was forced to run at maximum speed and the position of the noise meter was the same for each video card. We chose to force the fan to run at its maximum speed in order to simulate a “worst case” scenario.

Temperature: We measured the operating temperatures of the GPUs using the free application ATI Tool. Temperature was measured at idle, meaning only the operating system was running, and also at full load, in which we ran the “Natures” benchmark of 3D Mark 2001 for ten minutes.

Power Consumption: We tested power consumption using a power meter. The complete consumption of the system was measured; however, the hardware components, except for the video card, were exactly the same in each test, isolating the video card as the only source which was able to affect power consumption.

Even though the card was a completely fanless solution, the HIS Radeon X1650XT ended up consuming the most power. It consumed 10-15 Watts more compared to the other solutions tested. It is surprising to see the HIS solution consume the most power considering that the ASUS solution was the only one which actually required an auxiliary power connection.

The HIS Radeon X1650XT, which is a completely fanless solution, was naturally the quietest solution out of the cards we tested. The noise displayed on the graph for the HIS card was the ambient noise level of the test room. Out of the video cards tested that had an active cooling system, the Sapphire X1650XT had the quietest noise level under both full and idle load.

We apologize that our temperature analysis of the video cards is incomplete. This is because the ASUS and HIS video cards we tested unfortunately did not come with any temperature sensor installed on the GPU. Thus, we were unable to record their temperatures.