Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of performance. These are also the most important ways to differentiate the performance between cards that have the same GPU. To start things off I took a look at power usage. For this, I use our Kill-A-Watt hooked up to the test bench to record the total wattage of the system. I ran two tests with the first using 3DMark Fire Strike to put the system under a load similar to normal in game performance. Here our test system with the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X in it pulled 454 watts during the 3DMark Fire Strike combined test which is right (well two watts lower) with the 3070 Ti Founders Edition. I was even more surprised with the AIDA64 result however, the 3070 Ti Founders Edition pulled 400 watts where the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X pulled 381. Not bad for also having an overclock! The GPUz charts had the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X and the Founders edition closer together with the SUPRIM pulling 3 more watts to the GPU.

My next round of tests were looking at noise levels. These are especially important to me because I can’t stand to listen to my PC whirling. Especially when I’m not in game and other applications are using the GPU. For my testing, though I first tested with the fan cranked up to 100% to get an idea of how loud it can get, then again at 50% to get an idea of its range. The RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X fell right in the middle of the pack when it came to 100% fan speed which isn’t too bad considering the triple fan layout. But when we look at the RPM at 100% fan speed chart the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X is down in the lower 1/3 so it is a little loud considering the fan speeds, but that is most likely from having an extra fan compared to most other cards. The 50% noise levels were good but it is the under load test that is most important and the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X does well there. It’s down in the lower 1/3 with 36.1 decibels.

To finish up my testing I of course had to check out the cooling performance. To do this I ran two different tests. I used AIDA64’s Stress Test run for a half-hour each to warm things up. Then I documented what temperature the GPU leveled out at with the stock fan profile and then again with the fans cranked up to 100%. With the stock profile, the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X stayed cool at 64 degrees. For comparison, the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition was running at 73c in the same test. Cranking the fan up to 100% to see how good the cooling could be the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X cooled down to 48c. The Founders Edition was 55c there. The delta between the stock profile and the 100% fan speed numbers was 16c which is a good gap meaning there is still a lot of headroom if needed in the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X’s large cooler.

While running the stock fan profile testing I also took the time to get a few thermal images so we could see what is going on. But given how cool the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X was running there weren’t any major hotspots. On the fan side, you can see that the bottom portion of the card runs a little warmer than the top. Then on the back, the exposed back of the GPU is of course the hottest area as well as the section just below the GPU and the coolest is the blow-through portion down at the end. The top view shows some of the heat coming up out of the top but I was surprised that up under the card at the motherboard isn’t getting the normal hotspot that a vertical axial heatsink layout normally gets.

That would normally be all of my cooling testing. But given that the RTX 3070 Ti SUPRIM X does have two different BIOS modes with the top mounted switch that flips between a gaming mode and silent. I wanted to check out what the difference was. Both have the same overall clock speed and with that performance. But As you can see below, the two different modes do affect the overall load temperatures by 3 degrees. The noise difference between the two was minimal at just 1/10^th of a decibel and the wattage was the same.