Cooling, Noise, and Power
For the rest of my testing I focused on tests that don’t really show in game performance but are extremely important to the overall card performance. Here I take a look at the overall power consumption, cooling performance, and noise levels. To start that testing I jumped into power consumption where I tested the peak wattage pulled using both the Unigine Heaven and Valley benchmarks, we are moving away from the Heaven benchmark as the new Valley benchmark puts the card under a bigger load. This way you can get an idea of what the 390 Gaming 8G will pull under average gaming condition. Obviously this isn’t the max peak you will see as some games could pull a little more, but it helps get a good idea of what power supply you might need. So how did it do? Well it toped the charts in both test for the most power pulled for a single card. Sadly, this is one of the few times that being at the top of the charts isn’t a good thing, the MSI pulls a LOT of power, especially when compared to the GTX 980 that it competes with in a lot of performance benchmarks. Pulling a lot of power isn’t a deal breaker in most cases, but do keep it in mind when picking out your power supply.
My next test was to see just how much noise those two large Torx fans would put out. To do this I tested at 100% fan speed for a max noise level and then again at 50% fan speed for a more realistic result. Idle testing wasn’t needed because the 390 Gaming 8G turns both of its fans off when not under heavy load. So how did it do? Well at 100% fan speed it was in the bottom half of our charts meaning those two extremely large fans put out more noise than most when cranked up. The 50% fan speed result was a lot better but still one of the loudest tested. I didn’t notice the noise when testing at all but the downside to having such large fans is obviously a little more noise.
Going into our last test I was a little unsure how things would turn out. I mean on one hand the 390 Gaming 8G pulls more power than anything else we have tested and we know that more power draw means more heat. On the other hand, the card does have that extremely thick Twin Frozr heatsink and the two Torx fans. In the end it the two things washed each other out and the card came in right about average. This was still noticeably warmer than the other 390’s tested but also better than a reference card would do.
