NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 video card.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Idle Temperature:

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 video card had an idle temperature of 31.0C in a room that was 22.0C (72F). Not bad for a graphics card that features over 7 billion transistors!

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Gaming Temperature:

When playing Far Cry 3 and Battlefield 3 for about 30 minutes each, we hit 80C and didn’t manage to go over that threshold since that is what the cards default temperature limit is. Notice the fan speed went from 1140RPM at idle to 2060RPM 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 fan a bit. Notice that the GeForce GTX 780 is hitting 1006MHz on the core clock when gaming.

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 NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan and GTX 780 were found to be very quiet and shouldn’t be heard over the case fans found in most systems! NVIDIA GPU Boost 2.0 and the adaptive temperature controller found on both the Titan and GTX 780 are simply awesome and give gamers a great experience during gameplay.