Cooling, Noise, and Power

Before we get into the synthetic and in game benchmark results I would like to take a look at the other measurable aspects of the R9 290 Tri-X. To start things off, I put the R9 290 through our power consumption test that compares both the idle and in game performance wattages against other cards to see how much power you will truly need to run the card. As you can see below, even though the R9 290 Tri-X is up fairly high on the list it is actually surprisingly close to the R9 280X Toxic. The load power consumption falls in between the R9 280X Toxic and the GTX 780 Ti with a peak usage of 482 watts. You may see higher in some other games, but this is the peak wattage seen while running the Heaven 4.0 benchmark on our 6 core test bench that includes an SSD and hard drive as well as water cooling.

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Moving on to noise testing, I ran the R9 290 through decibel tests at idle, 50% fan speed, and 100% fan speed. Our 50% fan speed results are still new so I don’t have a full graph to include with them, but I do have results against 28 other video cards. The idle results are fairly moot really; most of the cards come in within a few decibels. 100% fan speed testing on the other hand has a wide range of results. The R9 290 Tri-X comes up fairly close to the top of the charts for noise, in the bad way. This is to be expected to a point really when you keep in mind it does have three fans on the Tri-X cooler. Even still, it still performed better than a few other dual and even single fan designs as well so Sapphire isn’t doing too badly with their triple fan design. For those who are curious at 50% fan speed the R9 290 Tri-X runs at a much quieter 68 decibels, this is more like what you should expect most of the time.  

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The last thing we have to look at with Sapphires triple fan Tri-X cooler is its actual cooling performance. To do that I ran the R9 290 Tri-X in the Unreal Heaven benchmark 4.0 until it reached a peak temperature. The R9 290 Tri-X warmed up to 72 degrees. This isn’t really all that much farther from the R9 280X Tri-X’s results. What is most impressive is when you compare the overclocked R9 290 Tri-X next to the various reference cards that we have tested in the past.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #33684 15 Jan 2014 18:07


Why not get over hump day with a look at the R9 290 Tri-X from Sapphire!

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