Benchmark: Noise
Talk about a role reversal. Gigabyte's card proved to be the coolest in our line up, but the incredibly-low temperatures come at the expense of system noise.
Digging deeper into the results, we found that Gigabyte's three fans are set to run at 40 per cent when idle, and fan speed quickly rose to over 55 per cent when playing Crysis 2. The end result is best-in-class temperatures coupled with bottom-of-the-pack noise readings.
PowerColor's PCS+, on the other hand, has a single fan running at 20 per cent when idle and it ramped up to just 33 per cent when playing Crysis 2. The card doesn't cool as well, but it is noticeably quieter than Gigabyte's OC model and fractionally quieter than AMD's reference design.
