 One of the things that's toughest to quantify about the Titan is its acoustics and its temperature sort of thing. Because the way that it works, you can actually set the temperature of your card. You can go, okay, I want to prioritize the temperature of my card. I'm going to go prioritize this and you set a temperature. You can set your temperature at 70 degrees. It comes at 80 degrees. You can set it to 90 degrees. You can move that slider around. What that will do is it will actually control itself and stay there. But then, wait, there's more. You can actually stay there a number of different ways. You can either stay there by having your fan ramp up and down, and that's with controllable fan curves, or you can stay there by having the GPU clock itself down dynamically and reduce its own voltage dynamically in order to stay there. So the actual temperature fluctuation of a GTX Titan is extremely tight. If it doesn't have to reach that temperature, it won't. If it's already got its fan speed on minimum, it's not going to just ramp up voltage needlessly in order to get there. But what it will do is it'll stay at or under that temperature and it'll do whatever you tell it to do in order to get there. So what that means is that comparing Titan against the other cards, so GTX 680 didn't work this way because it used GPU boost 1 versus GPU boost 2 on Titan, and that one was controlled by the total power of the board. So it was a power limitation as opposed to a thermal limitation that caused the GPU to ramp itself up or ramp itself down. So okay, so that's totally different. HD 7970 works totally differently, again, where it's actually just got its own kind of profile and it does its own thing and there's not a whole lot of control. It just kind of the GPU sort of is fast and then the fan speed ramps up as the GPU heats up and it compensates. So what we had to do was we had to kind of decide where we wanted our Titan to be. So we aimed for more of a high performance Titan. However, what you could do is set the fan to stay very, very much in control and have more of a silent Titan. So we had a fan curve that kind of went like this and then ramped up quite steeply at the end. So it's kind of a middle ground, but we gave it a good 50, 55% fan speed at that 80 degree mark in order to keep itself cool and make sure that the turbo was going to be able to ramp up because once you hit that temperature limit, your GPU boost, sorry, I called it turbo, but your GPU boost is going to start ramping up. So when I compare temperatures against the reference 680 and the reference 7970, you're probably the ones to look at most carefully here. When I compare temperatures against these cards, you have to bear in mind I could have just as easily set the Titan to run at a completely different temperature. So look at it this way. All of our cards are overclocked. 660 Ti SLI, 7970, 680, Titan, and there was one other card. What was our other card? Ah, yes, the Aries too. They're all overclocked. So this is what they sound like and this is the temperatures that they run at in order to reach the performance numbers that we were able to reach in our other videos. So let's start with idle temperatures without further ado. The 7970 was a little warmer than the others and everything else was pretty much the same with the GTX 660 Ti's and SLI. That's probably, honestly, that's probably an anomaly in the reading because pretty much all GPUs that have good coolers on them idle pretty close these days because of how advanced these video cards are and how they actually don't deliver much power to the GPU when it's idling so it can run quite close to ambient temperature. Load temperatures, we see a different story. Aries too steals the show. No duh. It's liquid cooled. So there's individual blocks on the two GPUs that are keeping that very, very cool. 660 Ti SLI pulls ahead of everything else. So this is a good opportunity to talk about reference boards versus non-reference boards. For example, R680 uses a reference cooler which has the advantage of exhausting the air out of your chassis through the vents in the back but has the disadvantage of not having an open design like this MSI 660 Ti that allows it to keep the GPU itself cooler. So this one kicks heat into your case but keeps your video card cooler overall. This one gets the heat out of your case but doesn't keep your video card itself as cool. So you have to make the decision. Do I care more about the other components of MSI? Do I have a stuffy cramped case and I got to get that heat out of there? Or do I have a big well ventilated case and I don't care and the other components aren't going to get hot anyway? So do I go with more of an aftermarket design? Moving right along, so load temperatures. Our Titan ran a little bit warmer than our GTX 680 but like I said before we could have just as easily set it to 78 degrees and it would have run at 78 degrees but that's how we got the performance we did and it ran a little bit less warm than our Radeon 7970. Now temperatures are meaningless without acoustics. So what we've done is we've set up our test bench with a microphone that is actually 12 inches away from where the GPU fans were located. It's a shotgun mic so it's a directional mic and we have taken sound readings of all the cards that we ran at idle and load as well as some reference noises. So I'm going to play back those reference noises, I'm going to play back those fan speeds and I'm going to calibrate it while I'm editing so that the sound of my voice in my ears is about like listening to me talk from a few feet away and then hopefully all those other sounds will be similar to what they would be like if you were listening to them. So there you go, there's our acoustics and temperatures. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. I think that whispering is sort of... random and not always the same but this is like kind of a... If you were 2-3 inches from someone's ear you'd whisper about like this. This would be a normal conversational talking voice, just talking to someone who's about 3-4 feet away from you.