Power, Temperature and Noise
AMD is competitive in terms of performance, but Nvidia's Maxwell architecture holds the upper hand with regards to efficiency. Our system chews through more power with an R9 380X at the helm than it does with a much faster GTX 970.
Relatively high power consumption usually intimates a GPU that's tricky to keep cool, yet Sapphire has no problem chilling the overclocked Antigua XT core. 72ºC under load is perfectly acceptable and the high idle reading can be attributed to the fans switching off. Or do they...?
During testing, we were surprised to find that our sample's two 100mm fans would rarely turn off and instead continued to spin at ultra-low speeds of around 150 RPM. Further investigation reveals that the fans are indeed off at first boot, but after a gaming session in our test chassis, the GPU wouldn't always cool down enough to enable the fans to shut off completely.
Sapphire may want to look into tuning the fan profile further, but nonetheless the card remains reasonably quiet at all times. Fan speed peaked at 1,340 RPM when gaming, and though the cooler can clearly be heard, it's not particularly intrusive.
