NVIDIA GeForce Titan X 12 GB Review 218

NVIDIA GeForce Titan X 12 GB Review

Value & Conclusion »

Thermal Camera & Fan Noise Recording

In this section, we bring you an audio-visual representation of the card's thermals and noise output. The video below is a recording of the card in both idle and load, while independent instruments log audio, thermal-imaging, optical video, and numeric sensor data in real time. To make this happen, we set up a new rig with a passively-cooled Core "Haswell" processor and ASUS TUF Sabertooth motherboard. We also used ASUS's Thermal Armor kit with the motherboard to ensure that heat from the motherboard doesn't obscure our thermal imaging. Our instruments include a FLIR-made thermal camera with a resolution of 320x240 pixels, a normal optical camera, a sensitive shotgun microphone, and GPU-Z, to log the GPU's sensor data.

The thermal camera also serves as a non-contact thermometer. Its crosshairs are trained on the graphics card and will dynamically follow the highest temperature. The audio portion of the video is only to illustrate the tonal quality and relative change from idle to load, not the absolute volume. It is to give you an idea of how the card revs its fans up in reaction to increasing temperatures.


At first, the card is running in idle. We start putting load on the card at around timecode 0:15, and you can see how, shortly after, temperatures and fan noise increase in the thermal-imaging video. A little bit of coil whine is audible as well, though it does get drowned out the more the fan spins up. Depending on the game and its frame rate, coil noise is more or less audible; our test is also using a high framerate scenario to reveal any potential coil-noise problems.

Maximum temperatures are reached near the two memory chips on the edges, but temperatures are low enough to not be any cause for alarm.

After a while, we stop the load, and you can quickly see the card return to normal temperatures and noise levels.
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Apr 25th, 2024 01:18 EDT change timezone

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