Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit and did some temperature testing on the NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 video card.

Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition Idle:

The Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition had an idle temperature of 48.0C in a room that was 26.0C (79F).

Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition in Games:

In game titles like Dirt Showdown we were hitting 99C, which is getting pretty toasty. Keep in mind that we test everything on the open test bench.

Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition in Furmark:

With Furmark fired up and running at 1024×768 we saw the temperature reach 102C and then the card started to throttle and the temperatures started to drop a bit. The card ran like a champ at these extreme speed and it throttled like it was supposed to when it got too hot. We didn’t try to blow it up, but we weren’t nervous at these speeds as the card acted like it was supposed to and throttled down to lower temperatures.

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 38dB. 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 Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone Edition is silent, so the noise level remained the same across all test scenarios. Our test system was still observed at 41.7 dBA though due to the water cooler pump and fans that were being used to cool the processor. The Zotac GeForce GT 640 Zone is truly silent and that is awesome. In order to get zero noise you’ll have to sacrifice GPU temperatures though and that is up to you to decide.