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 the 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.

We start putting load on the card at around timecode 0:15, and you can immediately hear its coil whine - the chirping sound. It comes from the card's voltage regulation circuitry and is caused by coils vibrating under the stress of power draw. Depending on the game and its frame rate, coil noise is more or less audible, and it changes in frequency. There is also absolutely no coil noise in idle.I placed the radiator above the card, so both are situated at a similar distance from the microphone. While doing so does not affect temperatures significantly, you should obviously install the card into your system properly.Fan noise is clearly audible in even idle and quickly increases once load is applied to the card. Fan speed can unfortunately not be measured via software, which could either be due to a hardware limitation or driver bug. Both the fan on the card's heatsink and the fan on the radiator are controlled by the GPU, so there should be a way to monitor them. It is also not possible to control either fan's speed, which makes customizing the acoustic experience impossible.Toward the end of the test, you see the voltage regulator circuitry glowing a bright white in the thermal image, as the circuity peaks at 103°C, which is quite hot. A look at the PCB's photos reveals that the hot components are not on the back, but the front - their heat moves through the PCB to the other side of the card. Those components are engineered to withstand 120°C without a problem, but it still looks as though AMD didn't think their thermal solution through all the way.How the card's massive power draw heats up both power cables and their plugs is interesting as well, and at around 60°C, the radiator on top of the card is also getting quite warm.Edit: Some users have commented that the radiator on top of the card might block the air exhaust for the VRM cooling. So I did another test with the radiator located far away from the card.As you can see, the temperatures are the same.