Cooling, Noise, and Power
For the most part, a lot of our benchmarks will come down to the clock speed when comparing similar cards. But when it comes to testing Cooling, Noise, and Power this isn’t always the case. You see, even if two R9 280X’s had the same exact cooling performance how much heat they generate will change the end results. The same goes for noise testing as well, they may cool the same but different design can be more or less noisy. So a lot of times this section of benchmarks can be the most interesting to me. Starting with the R9 280X Toxic’s power consumption things looked normal on the idle side. But when put under load the card pulled a whopping 475 watts, 20 watts more than the overclocked 280X from Asus. That puts the Toxic’s power draw up over the GTX 780 and just under the GTX 780Ti.
For noise testing, I expected the results to be close to the 270X considering their similarities. As expected the R9 280X was within .3 decibels of its brother. This was enough of a difference to drop it down a few spots lower though, but keeping it in line with most of the other triple fan designs.
When it came to cooling, the R9 280X did generate more heat than the R270X Toxic. This showed with a bump of 6 degrees. This put it up above the Asus 280X as well, but keeping in mind the additional overclock that the Toxic has I don’t think that is a big shock. At 65 degrees the R9 280X Toxic is still a very cool running card.