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Power efficiency wasn’t AMD’s strongest hand to behind with on 290X, and 290 makes it just a bit worse.

By operating at higher voltages in general, and then furthermore higher clockspeeds (requiring higher voltages), the 290 draws just a wee bit more power than the 290X under our gaming workload. In fact because these cards are effectively tied in performance in this game, we can even see at least some of the impact of the 290’s higher voltages. Moving on to power consumption under Crysis 3, we can see just how AMD’s TDP hasn’t changed compared to the 290X.

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Until they fix that, the 290 series will draw several watts more than any other modern single-GPU card.

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The 16 GDDR5 memory chips aren’t doing AMD any favors, but more significantly they appear to still have a power leak in their drivers at idle. Idle power is essentially unchanged from the 290X. With that out of the way, let’s dive into power, temperatures, and noise. With a fan speed of 47% the 290 has enough cooling to sustain 947MHz across everything except the TDP limited FurMark and Company of Heroes 2. Even a bit more cooling allows the card to jump to far higher clockspeeds, which significantly improves performance. Having established that, we can see why AMD’s 7% fan speed increase had such a large impact on performance.

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The GTX Titan, by comparison, sees a full 100mv decrease going from 940MHz to 836Mhz.

If these results are reasonably accurate then this means that the power costs of ramping up the clockspeed are relatively cheap, but the power savings of throttling down are relatively sparse. This means at any given clockspeed the GPU on the 290 is going to be drawing more power – likely more than enough to offset the reduction from the disabled CUs – and furthermore we’re seeing that the voltage reduction from operating at lower voltages is not very significant. In the case of the 290 we have the latter.Īs such the 290 is operating at a higher voltage than the 290X at both the base GPU clockspeed of 662Mhz, and the boost GPU clockspeed of 947MHz. Second tier products are a mixed bag in this regard as sometimes they’ll be composed solely of chips with damaged functional units that can be shut off and then downclocked to operate at a lower voltage, while in other cases they’ll also include chips that have worse leakage and power consumption characteristics. To that end you can immediately see that the 290 starts off in a weakened position relative to the 290X. Radeon R9 290 Series Voltages (VDDC/GPU-Z) These aren’t “perfect” numbers as we don’t have the ability to factor out fluctuations due to temperature or the impact of vDroop, but they’ll work in a pinch. And what works is GPU-Z, which can read the VDDC coming off of the IR 3567B controller. Ideally we’d use VIDs here, but due to the fact that none of our regular tools can read AMD’s VIDs for the 290 series, we’re left with what works. There’s no getting around the fact that 47% on the 290 series reference cooler is going to be loud, and in this section we’ll break down those numbers and attempt to explain why that is.įirst, let’s start with voltages. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.Īs we alluded to in our look at the 290’s build quality and AMD’s last minute specification change, while the 290 has great performance under the complete range of our gaming benchmarks, it’s with power, temperature, and noise that it has to pay the piper for that performance. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise.