ASUS Strix R9 380X DirectCU II OC Review

We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The ASUS Strix R9 380X DirectCU II OC is an exceptionally quiet card. At idle and under low load situations the fans don't spin – making this a very solid choice for a powerful media center style build. Under greater loads once the temperature reaches 60c, the fans spin up, peaking at around only 1,200 rpm.

These are very slow spinning fans under the default ASUS profile, however you can obviously trade for greater cooling performance by manually tweaking settings in an application such as MSI Afterburner.

The ASUS Strix R9 380X DirectCU II OC exhibited no coil whine at all, even under stressful and extremely synthetic test parameters.

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