Cooling, Noise, and Power

Once I figured out where the Nitro R9 390 stood performance wise I was excited to test out the aspects that Sapphire has more control over like the cooling and noise performance. But first I ran it through our power consumption testing to see how it compared to Nvidia’s current cards and the R9 290 that it replaces as well. Given that the GPU architecture hadn’t changed I wasn’t surprised that the R9 390 pulled even more power than the last gen did. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal if the AMD R9 290 and R9 290X weren’t already at the top of our charts. So the R9 390 pulled 506 at peak, slightly higher than the overclocked R9 290X. This is a far cry from the 413 that the overclocked GTX 980 pulled though so keep that in mind when getting a power supply as well. It’s going to hit your pocketbook when you get your electric bill.

With three huge fans I was a little worried about the noise performance of the Nitro when I first got it in. I was surprised by the results though with it falling in the middle of our charts at max fan speed. The 50% fan speed results were even better and of course at idle the card turned the fans completely off so it is silent when not doing anything demanding.

So last but not least, how was the cooling performance? Well at 71 degrees it is right in the middle of our charts. If you look closely thought this is one degree higher than the Sapphire R9 290 but with a higher clock speed I will take the small difference and call it a wash. Given the high power draw numbers Sapphire had their hands full to keep this card running reasonably cool and they did accomplish that.