EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming Idle and Load Temps:

When it comes to temperatures the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming video card idled at 23C on our open air test bench and got up to 40C when gaming for over an hour non-stop. These are very impressive GPU temperatures thanks to the water cooling solution! If you are wanting low temperatures and have room to mount the 120mm radiator/fan, then this card should be of interest to you!

Here is a chart that shows the temperatures of some of the recent cards for comparison!

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

The two fans on the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 Hybrid Gaming are always spinning as this is not a 0dB model and you also have the water pump humming along. This means that the idle speeds are higher than all other cards, but the load temps were on the louder side, but it should be noted that the fan speed ramped up when we hit 40C on the GPU and that only happened on select game titles.

** The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X reference card that we are using was the original model with a loud water pump that whines. AMD changed the pump design before the cards hit the retail market, but wasn’t willing to replace ours. We expect retail cards to perform quieter for this and hopefully AMD will send us a replacement card for proper noise testing. **