Sapphire Tri-x Radeon R9 290x 8GB Graphics Card Review

Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures

Noise

Everyone has their own reasonable noise level when it comes to comes to components in a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down, some want a completely silent computer. Gainward have spent a vast amount of money fine tuning their cooling solutions to provide excellent cooling properties, but also keeping the noise levels down, lets see if it’s paid off shall we?

Despite having three 92mm fans, the Sapphire Tri-x R9 290x 8GB is one of the quietest cards we’ve tested. Only being beat by the rather unbeatable Phantom cooler.

Power Consumption

With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load.

Here we see AMDs downfall, its high power consumption. Even though they make some seriously powerful cards, NVIDIA can somehow match them on performance and undercut them on power. Here we see the Sapphire Tri-x R9 290x 8GB drawing almost 120W more than the NVIDIA GTX 980!

Temperatures

The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds .We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient; in the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created.

Surprisingly, even though the R9 290x draws more power, Sapphire has somehow managed to tame all the heat from this with that amazing Tri-x cooling solution. A mere 69°c at full load, almost as cool as an AMD R9 295 X2 with watercooling.