Noise

In our living room environment, the Nintendo Switch emits a light humming noise about 30 decibels, which is about ambient room noise for a library environment. The folks at GamersNexus have done some extensive thermal testing and discovered that the console will operate at higher clock speeds under a Junction temperature of 70C, but will drop in frequency by about 6 percent between 70C and 90C. They found the system to boot at around 28C, followed by a rise to about 57C during game loads and 33 to 36dBa under heavy workloads.

In terms of load noise, a few devices for comparison would be the noise levels of any recent Intel Skylake or Kaby Lake convertible notebook on full load, or similar convertible notebook from the past three years. On average, the Nintendo Wii emitted around 32.3dB while playing games and 22dB idle, while the Wii U constantly emitted noise reminiscent of a firetruck (that was a joke).