Noise and overclocking
Remember just how low the FleX's under-load temperature was, hovering at 70°C? The reason for this rests, to a degree at least, with the aggressive fan-speed profile programmed in by Sapphire. You see, the logs show the centrally-mounted fan spinning at 2,800rpm when under load, and this is enough to make the card decidedly louder than, say, a GTX 570 or GTX 580. You can, of course, manually tune the fan's speed by using the TriXX utility, by sacrificing some cooling ability for a lower-speed fan.
Meanwhile, the GTX 570's fan spins at 2,000rpm and the GTX 580's at 2,250rpm, according to GPU-Z's readings.
Overclocking
Already pretty nippy at 930MHz core and 5,500MHz memory, we managed to raise the sample's speed to 975MHz core and 5,800MHz memory, using 1.25V. Performance in the 2,560x1,600 FXAA test rose from an average 36.5fps to 38.9fps, though this is accompanied by a nine per cent rise in power-draw and an extra 1.9dB in noise.
