Cooling, Noise, and Power

Considering how close the performance between the two R9 380’s has been it makes this section even more important. In this section we get to take a look at noise and temperature performance of the aftermarket coolers. Those coolers are one of the big factors in what sets each card apart. In this case I was also curious if the memory and overclock differences would play any part in power usage as well. So to start off I took a look at our power testing. I recorded idle numbers with our Kill A Watt then ran the 380 through the Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and noted the peak wattage the whole testbench pulled. This does include our 6 core testbench and water cooling so you can expect slightly lower numbers on a more normal build. So surprisingly the MSI 380 pulled 390 watts at peak load where the PowerColor pulled 379. This was actually less than our overclocked R9 285 even putting the PowerColor down with R9 270X’s and GTX 760’s.

For noise testing I ran through three decibel tests. Once with the fans turned up to 100% for a worse case benchmark, once at 50% for a real world number, and then at idle. Like a lot of the cards recently the PowerColor R9 380 turns off its fans at idle. At 100% fan speed the PowerColor was noisier than the MSI 380 by a little over three decibels putting it up in the top half of the cards we have tested in the past. I’m guessing the smaller fans on the PowerColor have a higher max speed to make up for their size. At the more realistic 50% fan speed test the two cards were very close with the PowerColor actually being quieter.

As we saw in the last test if the PowerColor R9 380 is cranked up it can get noisy so it is important for it to be able to control its temperatures without having to reach 100% fan speed. So to test the cooling performance I ran the card in Heaven Benchmark 4.0 again, this time letting it run until the temperatures leveled off. At 73 degrees this card does run noticeably warmer than the average card with aftermarket cooling, in fact it was up close to what the reference cards are running. Given the smaller heatsink and smaller fans I should have seen it coming. If you have a case that would have issues with tall cards this might be the best option still though.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36760 29 Jun 2015 23:06
Today I take a look at the 4GB R9 380 from PowerColor, check it out!

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