Acoustics
A feature often overlooked when purchasing a graphics card is the noise that it emits. We all hear (no pun intended) of graphics cards that run like a jet engine which can have a detrimental effect on a gaming session, regardless of the FPS it churns out. It is therefore extremely important that a graphics card should operate as quietly as possible.
To test for this we will be using a sound meter and microphone setup which will be placed 20cm away from the GPU. The test will take place in a quiet (not sound proof) room with the results for the GPU fan at low (30%) and highest (100%) settings.
Results
Inaudible save for a very light hum, the KFA2 GTX570 performed admirably at idle. Even when stretched, the fan didn't rise to anything above a murmur. During testing throughout our suite of benchmarks, the KFA2 GTX570 didn't manage to drown out our setups case fans which is a great achievement. The noise did however increase significantly when manually setting the fan to 100%. A high pitched whine was emitted from the PC enclosure but thankfully this never happened during our testing so it is unlikely you will hear this unless your PC case resembles an oven!
Power Consumption
For this test, we will be using a wall meter with the test setup plugged in minus the Monitor. Readings were taken at both stock and overclocked conditions each having readings also taken in idle and 100% load (Furmark). FurMark is perhaps not indicative of a true gaming environment and indeed is not recommended by NVIDIA or AMD to test stability of a card but in my view, much like Prime95 for CPU's, it puts the graphics card under the highest possible stress and presents a good 'worst case' scenario. So while it is unlikely your card will ever be stressed as much under normal conditions, it is a good indicator of a theoretical maximum.
Results
At idle the KFA2 GTX570 was the best GTX570 we have tested thus far which is most likely due to the clockspeeds of the card being set to default along with the voltages. Proving a point, the power consumption surpassed that of the MSI card despite being clocked significantly lower. Not a bad result but not the best either.
Let's see if the card performs in our suite of benchmarks...
