Cooling and Noise
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.
Sadly I wasn’t able to include power numbers, in testing, I damaged our P-Cat and was getting inaccurate results.
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 RX 9070 XT Pulse was impressive in the 50% fan speed test sitting in the bottom ¼ of our chart with a 37.2 decibel result. The Steel Legend is up near the top with its 42.3 dB result. Cranking the fans up to 100% the RX 9070 XT Pulse dropped even farther down in the chart and was the second quietest result. The 54.2 dB result was 4 and a half dB lower than the Steel Legend. This is especially impressive once we see the RPM chart. Normally the max speed noise results are close to the RPM chart but the RX 9070 XT Pulse is up in the top 1/3 for fan speed but extremely quiet. Great job Sapphire!
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 RX 9070 XT Pulse is the quietest card test at 33.1 dB and by a large margin even with the Steel Legend also doing well here but is still 1.1 dB louder.
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 RX 9070 XT Pulse leveled off at 58c putting it in the bottom ¼ of our chart and 1c below the Steel Legend. The memory temperatures were at 89c, 1c higher than the Steel Legend. The RX 9070 XT Pulse did that however with the fans hardly working, running at just 27%. Cranking the fans up it ran at 41c, 5c less than the Steel Legend, and an impressive 17c delta between the stock fan profile and 100% fan speed results. At full fan speed, the memory temps were much lower at 72c which does make me think that a little more on the stock fan profile might help keep those a little cooler without causing too much noise.
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 RX 9070 XT Pulse, as we saw in the temperature testing, was running cool, especially on the fan side. You can see that the blow-through section is cooler at 28c with the hottest spot being to the left of the center fan at 39c. There was more heat up on top where the warmed air is blowing out. The heatsink was registering 58.9c but the exposed areas of the PCB that you can see from that angle were up to 87c and the warm air blowing up onto our power cables had them warm as well. The hottest spot on the back view was the PCB again which was peaking out near the power connection. It was warm with the exposed PCB behind the GPU but the backplate itself which is also acting as a heatsink was cooler at 50c and down at the blowthrough end it was 46.8c.
