Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we use the included iPower Meter found with our Thortech PSU. As system load figures obviously differ from idle it is extremely difficult to get an accurate figure of system draw and then simply take this figure away from the overall amount because each game will generate varying levels of CPU and hard drive activity. Dynamic power adjustments which fluctuate in game will also affect accurate power figures thus rendering any such power consumption calculations redundant at worst and approximate at best.

We will therefore take our system readings averaged over a benchmark run of Tessmark (100% load) and after 20 minutes of being idle in Windows 7. These can then be used as a comparison to other graphics cards to determine how much more or less power you can expect a GPU to consume.



The Sapphire card is a hungry beast of that there can be no doubts. It consumed a little more than the reference design but less than the MSI lightning, most likely due to the overclocks applied.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.



The idle temps for the Tri-X R9-290X were very good. Under Furmark and the huge amount of stress this puts on the card we hit 78c. Please bear in mind that this is on a test bench and not a PC case so your results may differ but when compared to the competition it is neither astonishing nor disappointing. One thing is for sure it solves the temperature issues the reference design suffers from.

Acoustics

With three fans at its disposal, it is hardly surprising that the Sapphire card performed very well compared to the reference design. Strangely it couldn't match the lightning card's cooling despite the MSI example having a slightly higher overclock. What we can assure you, is that under normal load, you will struggle to hear the Sapphire. Of course when we manually adjusted the fans to 100% it was noisy but the likelihood of the fans spinning up to this revolution is extremely small under normal gaming conditions but it is nice to know you have this cooling overhead available should you need it.