Cooling Noise and Power

For my last few tests, rather than focusing on in game performance, I like to check out other aspects of video card 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 Time Spy to put the system under a load similar to normal in game performance. Here our test system with the RTX 3050 XC Black pulled a total of 252 watts which given the performance increase over the 1650 wasn’t too much more than it. At the same time with Time Spy I also use GPUz to check out the onboard reading for GPU power draw at the chip. The RTX 3050 XC Black registered 101.1 watts at the GPU which was just 1 watt higher than the RX 6600. Lastly, I run AIDA64’s stress test on the video card to load up only the GPU, and using the Kill-A-Watt the test bench with the RTX 3050 XC Black pulled 210 watts, just 12 over the GTX 1650.

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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. I test using both A and C weighting, A is the standard way and C has a little more of the low end to check for low-level hums. The RTX 3050 XC Black came in near the bottom of the chart both at 50% and 100% fan speeds. Most of the cards tested currently with it being a fresh reboot of our test rig are reference cards, but there are a few aftermarket cards in the mix and only the Zotac 3060 AMP was quieter. I also take a look at noise performance while under load. For that when running AIDA64’s stress test I wait until the temperature of the card has leveled off and then measure how loud things are when the card is at its worst-case scenario with the stock fan profile. Under load, the RTX 3050 XC Black is a little higher up on the chart, but still quiet with the A-weighted tests. The C weighted results across all three tests tell us a few things. At 100% fan speed the gap between A and C isn’t much and we can see some cards have more lower-end noise than others. But at 50% fan speed and the under load test the C weighted is significantly higher than the A-weighted with less of a difference from card to card.

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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 3050 XC Black was the coolest running card of the cards tested at 52 degrees. Then with the fans cranked up, the RTX 3050 XC Black dropped down to 45c which had a few cards a little lower than that. The delta between the two was only 7 degrees which is a little low, but that has less to do with the overall performance of the RTX 3050 XC Black and more to do with the card already running cool with the stock fan profile.

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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. It’s not a surprise given how cool the RTX 3050 XC Black ran in our testing, but the hottest spot in the fan side picture was actually below the card all together on the motherboard where the card blows some heat down onto the SSD up under the card. At the top, the cooler points aren’t far off from room temperature which was 74f or 23.3c. The hottest area is on the PCI bracket end of the card which can also be seen on the fan side with the right side of the card running much cooler. The back picture of the PCB supports this as well with the hottest spot directly behind the GPU but there also being hot spots with the VRMs in between the GPU and PCI bracket. Then the other end which doesn’t have much going on and has the blow through holes is running 12/14c cooler.

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