Cooling, Noise, and Power

There is a little more to just pure performance when picking out your next video card. Its important to know what kind of power it will draw at both idle and in game and cooling performance and noise are important, especially in cases that don’t insolate noise or have great cooling performance. To test the R9 270X DirectCU II Top I ran through our normal power, cooling, and noise tests. To start things off I tested the noise output at idle and at 100% fan speed. At idle the R9 270X DirectCU II Top was in line with most of the other cards, but it was a little louder than average. At 100% fan speed though; it actually performed better than expected, putting it down close to the bottom at 69.7 decibels.

For cooling performance and power load I use Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0. This gives a good idea of in game results while still being repeatable. The R9 270X DirectCU II Top’s  cooling performance was in the middle of the pack for all of the cards I have tested but sadly it was higher than the other R9 270S’s that I have tested recently. The difference is only a few degrees, but they did run a slightly lower temperature. That isn’t to say that the R9 270X DirectCU II Top does a bad job of cooling, because it is going to do considerably better than a reference card. But the more aggressive triple fan designs out performed for obvious reasons.

What about its power usage? Well idle power usage was right in the middle of the two other R9 270X’s tested at 206 watts. The important number is the load number and that result was also in between the other two cards at 360 watts at peak. This was only 4 watts higher than the Gigabyte card and considerably less than the Sapphire card that had a higher overclock.