ill buy your discos <| sep |> Wow shitty <| sep |> if you did , why didn ' t we see that in the video ? I ' ve been going back and forth with this card , and Asus tech support , for months . I didn ' t decide to film this video until it was requested a few weeks back by one of my regulars . I ' m not saying I couldn ' t have done a more thorough filming job , but reality is , I don ' t have the equipment to really encapsulate my realworld experience regardless . The hum from my goddamn 15 yearold induction motor in the furnace across the basement was going to make an accurate sound measurement impossible , so I went with what best represented the issue and involved the least amount of fudding around . Why 45 %? Arbitrary value . As long as it ' s consistent across all 3 samples , it doesn ' t really matter what I choose . It ' s louder than the other cards at 30 . It ' s louder than the other cards at 60 . You say the cooling is good , but that it ' s loud . Keeping the fan speed low is the obvious answer to that . Do the fans hit 45 % under normal operation with factory fan curve ? can you set it to 30 % instead ? I never commented on how I run the card in a typical use scenario , because that wasn ' t really the point of my video . For the record , I keep the fan running at 30 % until it hits 60 C , at which point it ramps up to 55 % for a plateau temperature of around 76 C . Very solid performance , considering the minor degree of restriction the PSU shroud imposes . The GTX 970 I own was housed under the same conditions , with a similar fan curve and slightly lower temperatures , thanks largely to the lower thermal profile , I suspect . It was much quieter at every interval , no exception . In fact , that 970 was fucking nuts . I couldn ' t hear it over the mild whirring of even a single Noctua Redux 140 mm running at 12 %. My main question was why Asus couldn ' t replicate this in their 1080 . Makes no sense , given the math of the situation . And furthermore , all of the complaints about my video are focused around the general noise of the card , which I concede , might be the result of a bad sample . The reason I ' m inclined to believe otherwise is because of how shoddily the rest of the premium features were implemented . The 4 pin fan connectors and the accent LEDs are just plain garbage . This doesn ' t inspire confidence in the rest of the design , and I ' m a lot less willing to forgive them for the noise when I see other aspects of the card failing so miserably .