Cooling, Noise, and Power

When building your PC there are a lot of things you have to take into account, especially when building a budget PC where you have to make compromises. A few examples of this would be less cooling in your case or a smaller power supply in order to put as much money as you can into things like the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X. That is why I make sure to include cooling, noise, and power testing on all of our video card reviews. It’s especially interesting to see the differences between different cards with the same base architecture. To start things off, I put the Toxic through our noise testing at both idle and 100% fan load tests to get an idea of its possible noise range. Actually noise performance will be lower assuming the cooling does a good job and doesn’t require the fans to be running at 100%. Sadly the three fan design was noisier than most of the cards I have tested in the past in both idle and 100% load tests. This is related to the triple fan design without a doubt.

When it came to temperature testing, I had high hopes. Sapphire obviously sacrificed noise testing for cooling performance. The end result were numbers that were impressive when compared to other cards tested, but a little higher than the R9 270X Windforce that I wrote about yesterday. Of course, these results also depend on the fan profiles that manufactures set, if they had the fans picking up speed at higher temps the load temp can end up running higher. Not to mention the Toxic does have a higher overclock, I’m sure that played a big role in the temperature difference as well.

So what about power usage? Well compared to the other R9 270X in our graph the Toxic does pull more wattage at idle. With a higher overclock this is to be expected. Under load that same overclock pulled more as well. This pushed the power usage up over some of our overclocked GTX 760’s as well. I wouldn’t say the Toxic R9 270X is good if you are trying to save on your power bill, but I have a feeling we will see the reason for the additional power draw when we take a look at the performance testing!

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33119 11 Oct 2013 13:31
Happy Friday everyone! Today I have a review of Sapphires flagship R9 270X called the Toxic. Enjoy

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