Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 G1 Gaming Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch February 26, 2015

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 GTX 960 G1 Gaming SoC video card.

Gigabyte GTX 960 SoC 2GB Idle Temps:

The Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming has no fans spinning at idle, so the card is dead silent thanks to the 0 RPM fans. It’s winter right now, so our room is a chilly 65F as it’s only 10F outside With this fairly low room temperature we were still impressed with a 34C idle temperature as the fans weren’t spinning!

When gaming we hit 67C when gaming for about on hour straight on the card. As you can see when we were gaming the GM206 Maxwell GPU hit a maximum speed of 1392.2 MHz.

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 Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming and ASUS STRIX GTX 960 DirectCU II OC 2GB have the same idle noise levels as both cards have no fans running and are dead silent. The only reason the system is above ambient noise levels is due to the processors water cooler pump and fan noise. Keeping in mind that the Gigabyte GTX 960 G1 Gaming runs at lower clock speeds than the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 OC, we found that it was just slightly quieter at load when gaming by about 1.8dB. This card is very quiet and didn’t have any bad choke whine to report or anything like that.