GoldenKevin

I understand that temperatures were tested and the noise level was described subjectively, but it would be great if we could get an actual number on the noise that this awesome card emits at 100% load or a comparison to other cards. I have a Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 (100293L) which runs nearly silent when I play less demanding games like Call of Duty (though I stress it out at the highest settings on 1280x720), and I wanted to know if this much more beefed up card shares the same fan noise characteristics. Surprisingly enough, AnandTech's temperatures for my lesser powered card were way higher than those reported for this card in this review (40 vs 34 for idle, and 79 vs 69 for load; myself, I'm getting around 42 on idle as reported by Catalyst Control Panel). I don't think even the copper vs aluminum heatsink could explain this extreme difference in temperatures. Perhaps the test machine used in this test had much better ventilation or the room temperatures were different? Or maybe the fan on this card blows at a much higher RPM, as the diameters of the fans look similar. And do you guys think that this card (which has to use less than 75W since it's powered only by PCI-e) will work with my 300W PSU (19A on +12V, 25A on +5V, 2A on +5Vsb, and 18A on +3.3V; +5V & +3.3V Shall Not Exceed 175W, +5V & +12V Shall Not Exceed 268W) in conjunction with a 65W Core 2 Duo E6750, one DVD optical drive, one HDD, a WiFi PCI card, and six USB ports drawing 100mA each?