Cooling, Noise, and Power

As impressive as the performance numbers are, it is all for nothing if the ITX Compact pulls more power than any SFX power supply can handle or if it puts out more heat than any small form factor case can handle. Because of that I ran it through our standard tests on our testbench then when I was done I went back to Lunchbox 3 and tested to see how well it performed in the enclosed space as well.

Starting with power consumption it performed surprisingly well. At idle the entire test bench pulled a total of 192 watts, almost the lowest number I have ever seen at idle. Keep in mind this is all done with a high TDP 6 core CPU with water cooling where in a SFF build you would most likely be pulling even less power. Under load I saw a peak of 385 watts, 10 watts less than the MSI GTX 760 and 18 watts less than the Asus GTX 670. This still keeps us in the upper range of what our Silverstone SFX PSU can handle, but we have yet to have an issue with them over the last two years of use. Silverstone is talking about bringing even higher wattage models out any time now as well if you are worried.

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For noise the ITX Compact fell on the low to mid area of the charts overall. This was spot on for the MSI ITX card under load. At idle it was slightly higher, but not enough to worry about. At 50% fan speed, we saw a few more decibels as well. You have to expect some noise when you are trying to cool a fast card with a single fan, but I doubt there will be any more noise than the other ITX cards in real world use. Depending on the cooling performance, it might even be less noise if the card rarely has to spin up as high as the other cards.

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On the open-air testbench, I ran the ITX Compact through the Unreal Heaven benchmark to see how much things warmed up. Shockingly I saw a peak temperature of 71 degrees, a number that would be average for a normal card, but is 6 degrees better than the next coolest ITX video card. Like I said before, packing that much heat into a small video card can be tough, sapphire did a great job handling it. So the more important test was how well did it stay cool in our small build? Well running the same test I saw a peak of 73 degree’s. Mind you, with the other two cards I would sometimes have to take the side panel off at LANs to give them extra cooling to keep things from overheating. The Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285 shouldn’t have that issue at all.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #35662 12 Sep 2014 21:08
Some of you had the chance to check this card out at the LAN, Chad even was able to game on it all weekend. Now check out the official test results!

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