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 AIDA64. 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 RTX 5070 Founders Edition averaged 271 watts and peaked at 287 watts. This interestingly put it right above the RTX 3070 which shows just how much the efficiency has improved over the last two generations.
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 RTX 5070 Founders Edition is up in the top ¼ of our efficiency chart but still below all of the other 50 Series cards. It sits ahead of the RTX 4090. It is significantly ahead of the RX 7800 XT which is the card closest in price right now with the RTX 5070 Founders Edition at 37.79 to the 7800 XT’s 30.07.
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 5070 Founders Edition is right in the middle of our chart for the 50% fan speed test with 40.5 dB and at 100% fan speed it dropped down in the chart with 57.5dB at that speed. This is interesting because the RTX 5070 Founders Edition has its fans cranked at 4351 RPM, topping the RPM chart.
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 RTX 5070 Founders Edition is up in the top 1/3 of the chart with 40.9 dB running in between the RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4090. This is higher than it was on both our 50% and 100% fan speed tests, that is because Nvidia has it running at 51% fan speed when under load.
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 RTX 5070 Founders Edition was up almost at the top of our chart, leveling off at 74c when under load. That is right in line with what a lot of Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards did, but remember to reach that it was running at 51% fan speed meaning you would really have to crank the fans up to run any cooler. The memory wasn’t as bad with the stock fan profile, running at 66c. Turning the fans up the memory dropped down 10c to 56c. The GPU dropped down to 64c which was a delta of 10c but the RTX 5070 Founders Edition was up near the top of the chart at 100% fan speed.
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. On the fan side of the RTX 5070 Founders Edition, you can see that the metal fan shroud has absorbed some of the heat when running for a half hour. The hottest area is the center of the left fan and the blow through the right side is noticeably cooler. The top view shows the same thing that we saw with the fan side. The metal shroud isn’t hot, but it is 7c warmer the full length of the PCB and then the blow-through end has a solid line where the temperature changes. The power connection area is the hottest spot up on top, partially because this is also the closest to any exposed PCB. Then on the back side, this entire side is running 20c or more compared to the fan side with the hottest spot being on the far right behind the GPU. Even the blow-through area is warmer here and if you look closely you can see each of the heatpipes that run down through that end as well.
