NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch May 18, 2016

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.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Idle and Load Temps:

When it comes to temperatures the GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X Founders Edition graphics card were 34C at idle and 83C at load while gaming on our open air test bench. This is not a 0dB fan design, so notice the fan was spinning at 1100 RPM at idle and then 2200 RPM at load.

Here is a chart that shows the temperatures of the GeForce GTX 1080 FE versus some other high-end desktop cards.

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 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 isn’t the quietest card we’ve ever tested, but it isn’t the loudest either. We have no complaints about the sound level or choke whine issues with our sample card.

** 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. **