Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB Video Card Review

Noise and Temps

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB video card

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB Idle Temperature:

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB video card had an idle temperature of 33.0C in a room that was 22.0C (72F).

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB Gaming Temperature:

When playing Far Cry 3 and Battlefield 3 for about 30 minutes each, we hit 70C and did not get any hotter than this as that is the temperature target of this video card. The Gigabyte WindForce 3X cooler does an impressive job keeping the GeForce GTX 770 factory overclocked card running nice and cool. Notice the fan speed went from just 800RPM at idle to 2280RPM when gaming. You really can’t hear the card with it in your system at idle, but when you start gaming you can hear the three 75mm fans a bit when they start spinning at 2300RPM. Notice that the card is hitting 1215 MHz on the core clock right out of the box thanks to NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 and these nice low GPU temperatures!

The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X isn’t the coolest or hottest card in our performance chart, but we can live with 33C at idle and 70C at full load! Those are very nice temperatures and this card should last for many years in that range with the quality components it uses.

Sound Testing

We recently upgraded our sound meter to an Extech sound level meter with 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.

When it comes to noise levels the WindForce 3X GPU cooler was one of the quietest that we have tested in recent months thanks to the low idle fan speed of just 800RPM. At full load we were jumped up from ~41dB to ~47dB, which isn’t bad at all considering the old NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 reference design was at ~54dB! The new GeForce GTX 700 series is very quiet and that is one of the key selling points with one of these new cards. Hard to complain when it runs faster, cooler and quieter than your 2-3 year old video card at the same price point.