HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X Turbo X Graphics Card Review

Acoustics
Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it’s necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain.

The sound level of the fan shows the variance between the card at idle (30%) and at load using FurMark (53%) and also includes an ambient sound level of around 25dBA. This shows that the car is indeed fairly quiet and gaming should prove slightly lower results than FurMark due games being designed to spike whereas FurMark is an intensive application throughout the whole test.