The accurate computation of gradients of simulated thermodynamic properties with respect to force field parameters is highly important for efficient model optimization. The thermodynamic property being differentiated contains statistical noise due to the finite length of the simulation, so we expect the parametric gradients to contain statistical noise as well. Moreover, different methods for computing the parametric gradient may exhibit varying levels of statistical noise for the same computational resources used in the calculation. Thus, we decided to compare the statistical noise in the surface tension gradients for two calculation methods: "semi-analytic" (i.e. the property gradient is computed from a thermodynamic fluctuation formula using finite-difference potential energy gradients), and "pure numerical" (i.e. by running separate simulations for each parameter).