Power, Temperature and Noise
We're continuing to see factory-overclocked partner cards take their toll on system-wide power consumption. Despite the modest overclock, power draw during Far Cry 3 jumped up by 20 per cent.
That's nice to see, isn't it? Much was made of AMD's hot-running reference board, but custom-cooled partner cards provide a very clear answer: the R9 290X needn't be toasty.
With the WindForce cooler at hand, Gigabyte's card is able to lower under-load temperature by as much as 22 per cent, resulting in a relatively-cold reading of 74ºC.
There is one small catch, though. The WindForce cooler ran particularly well on the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, where it was able to maintain low temperatures at fan speeds below 2,000rpm.
The same cooler is pushed harder on the Radeon GPU. While playing Far Cry 3, we noticed fan speed on the R9 290X WindForce OC would increase to just over 3,000rpm after 10 minutes or so. The card doesn't get quite as loud as reference, but it isn't as quiet as it might have been.
