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We take our noise measurements with the sound meter positioned 1 foot from the graphics card. I measured the noise floor to be 32 dBA, thus anything above this level can be attributed to the graphics cards. The power supply is passive for the entire power output range we tested all graphics cards in, while all CPU and system fans were disabled.
A reading under load comes from running the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra stress test 20 times. An idle reading comes after leaving the system on the Windows desktop for 30 minutes.
As for noise levels, BIOS 2 is the quieter of the two BIOS – which we would expect, given it is called the ‘Silent' BIOS, but the difference really is not very noticeable at all. In practice, I found BIOS 2 would run the fans at around 1350rpm, or 59%. BIOS 1, however, only ran the fans at around 1440rpm, or 63% – so just 90rpm faster under full load.
I do find this a bit of a shame, as while it's great to have a secondary BIOS for redundancy, it doesn't really offer anything different in terms of functionality – Palit could take a leaf from PowerColor's book, whose 5700 XT Red Devil had a ridiculously quiet secondary BIOS which was noticeably different to the primary BIOS. We don't get that here.
