Power, Temperature and Noise
If you've been purring over the 4K in-game results, it's time for a reality check, or two. For starters, the Devil 13 is a very hungry card, with system-wide power consumption measured at almost 700 watts during a run of Far Cry 3.
What's more of a concern is the amount of heat that's kicked out of the card's triple-slot body. An under-load temperature of 93ºC suggests that this is a red-hot-devil indeed, but in truth it feels hotter than the number suggests. During benchmarking, the heat output was enough to make our entire 600T chassis feel warm to the touch, and the card did have a tendency to throttle down to around 950MHz.
Turns out there was a good reason for AMD to liquid-cool the R9 295X2: air-cooling for two R9 290X GPUs on a single PCB just doesn't seem sufficient.
It's a triple-whammy as far as power draw, temperature and noise are concerned. When in full flight, the Devil 13 card really struggles to keep the cores running cool and fan speeds are ramped up almost full-whack, to around 90 per cent. As you might imagine, it gets incredibly loud and switching between BIOS modes doesn't appear to help - the default and turbo profiles both delivered similar results.
