The new GeForce RTX 5070 Ti goes on sale as the most affordable GeForce model with the Blackwell architecture to date. We’re looking at one of the best-equipped versions—the MSI GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16G Vanguard SOC, a top-tier model from MSI. It features an extremely powerful cooler with massive headroom and excellent performance but comes at a price comparable to the RTX 4080 Super from the previous generation.
Fan behavior, noise level
The fans are large and powerful, so they are quiet only at low speeds. The minimum power level that can be set in the control software is 30%, at which they spin at 1000 rpm, with a measured noise level just above 30 dBA. They become noticeably audible somewhere between 1400 and 1500 rpm. In silent mode, they typically operate around 1200–1250 rpm, with a measured noise level of about 33–33.5 dBA, which is an absolutely luxurious value. It’s likely that you won’t hear the card over the other fans in the case, and at this noise level, the power delivery coils might be more annoying than the fans themselves.
With the Vanguard, the coil whine is average and no different from what is common for cards with similar power consumption and performance, so they can be heard normally over the background of the fans. Average means you might also encounter cards that buzz more piercingly.
In performance mode, the fans are clearly audible at speeds around 1540 rpm and 38.8 dBA, but they are still noticeably quieter than most budget models, which typically operate at noise levels of 40–44 dBA.
The fans can be spun up to 3200 rpm, so purely in terms of thermal performance, the cooler still has a huge reserve, giving you plenty of room to experiment with performance tuning. However, it’s unlikely many would be willing to endure 60 dBA during normal operation.
The first set of measurements comes from the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition benchmark with RT Medium settings at a resolution of 3840 × 2160 pixels. With these settings, the GPU is fully loaded. We’re doing six consecutive benchmark runs.
The graph always shows the last run, from which the average value for the warmed-up card is calculated.
The frame rate hovers around 49 frames per second.
The GPU clock speed ranges between 2767 and 2805 MHz, with an average of 2793 MHz.
The card’s power consumption hovers just below the GPU limit as read from HWiNFO. Green represents the card’s power consumption according to monitoring, and blue represents the CPU’s power consumption according to monitoring (read via HWiNFO).
The dark color represents the total power consumption of the entire PC, measured using a UT71E multimeter.
The average chip temperatures are absolutely luxurious, and the memory is also exceptionally well-cooled. However, maintaining such values at the cost of higher cooler noise simply isn’t worth it.
In Gaming mode, the fans spin just below 1600 rpm during the test. The graph should technically show three sets of values, but the curves of the individual fans overlap almost entirely, with deviations typically in the range of a few rpm.
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No coil whine charts anymore? 🙁
I’d like to start measuring it again in a few months in some form, but right now, that’s almost impossible because I’d need to measure all relevant cards for comparison with new ones and add more games and benchmarks. Plus, we’d also need to buy another Umik for that.
I believe that sooner or later, spectral sound analysis will return to graphics card testing. However, as Adam writes, there are currently other priorities, and the methodology will evolve and become more refined over time. And let’s trust that, within this framework, we will once again have an exact overview of coil whine noise level as well. 🙂
Hey man thanks for the deep analysis. Out of all the 5070 Ti, if you had to pick one and price is not an issue, which one would it be?