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, our test setup utilizes the Nvidia-designed PCat v2 along with cables to handle both traditional 6 or 8-pin connections as well as 12VHPWR. The PCat also utilizes a PCIe adapter to measure any power going to the card through the PCIe slot so we can measure the video card wattage exclusively, not the entire system as we have done in the past. I test with a mix of applications to get both in game, synthetic benchmarks, and other workloads like GeekbenchAI and OCCT. Then everything is averaged together for our result. I also have the individual results for this specific card and I document the peak wattage result. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan averaged 211 watts across our tests which put it just above the RX 7600 and below the RTX 4070 FE, not bad considering it is an overclocked card, and typically those aren’t as efficient. The OCCT workload was the highest wattage pulled with Cyberpunk 4k just behind that.
With having exact peak wattage numbers when running Time Spy Extreme I was also able to put together a graph showing the total score for each watt that a card draws which gives us an interesting look at overall power efficiency in the popular and demanding benchmark. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan came in with 35.66 points per watt which was up in the top half of our chart below the RTX 4070 SUPER and above the RTX 4080. For comparison, the 5070 FE was up at 37.79 points per watt. I know I mentioned it previously but I do have to wonder how different a stock-clocked card would be in this situation.
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 PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan did really well at 50% fan speed coming in at 37.1 decibels. It went up in the chart for the 100% fan speed result however putting it closer to the middle of the pack. But when we see the fan RPM chart we do see that it is sitting lower on the noise chart than the RPM chart which means they did a good job given the total fan speed.
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. Here the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan is back in the bottom 1/3 of the chart which is great to see. This is the most important noise result and it came in at 35.6 dB, right above the Prime 5070.
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 (on everything except the 5090 which was tested on a similarly matched OCCT workload). 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 PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan leveled off in temperature at 70c which is in the top half of our chart and is sitting ahead of the RTX 4070 SUPER and below the RTX 3070 FE. It did that with the fan speed sitting at 44% which means that there is room for the fan profile to be tuned a little but that would be at the cost of under-load noise performance which the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan did well with. Then with the fans cranked up, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan crept up a little farther in the chart but did drop down from 70c to 58c. That is a delta of 12c which does show what I already mentioned, there is room for a little adjustment in the stock fan profile. But the 100% fan speed results aren’t too big of a surprise given that this is a relatively compact 2-fan and dual-slot card. As for memory temperatures, the PNY RTX 5060 Ti Overclocked Dual Fan was middle of the pack with the stock fan profile but did well when the fans were cranked up.
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. The PNY RTX 5060 Ti was coolest behind the right fan on the fan side of the card with the left fan being 6c warmer down at the bottom but the hotspot did show a small spot up in the top of that fan near the power connection. The top view showed the same thing with the area near the power connection running up to 64.5c and it gets cooler as you go from that end to the other end of the card. The same on the back side as well with the hottest spot on the back being even hotter at 71c. It was 51c near the middle of the card and 47c down on the end at the blow-through area.
