Power, Temperature and Noise
Guess what the price is for such superlative single-card performance? Power consumption is the highest we've ever seen from one board. Time to dust off those 1kW PSUs we've been storing up.
Keeping all that heat in check was never going to be possible with air cooling. AMD's sensible - and only - decision was to use liquid cooling. The dual-block Asetek cooler does a remarkable job of taming both R9 290X-like GPUs.
A combination of GPU fan and radiator exhaust fan had us worried on the noise front. The card isn't what we'd deem as very quiet - the fans can be heard - but they combine to make a whooshing sound more than a shrill. The sound meter has them pegged as being less obtrusive than a single R9 290X's fan that has to jump into overdrive to keep that GPU below 100°C.
