Power, Temperature and Noise
Performance is decent, clearly, but the different approaches by AMD and Nvidia do show in the power consumption charts. AMD's R9 390 can draw direct provenance from a GPU released four years ago. Nvidia, on the other hand, has optimised the nascent Maxwell architecture far better for efficiency.
So we're impressed with Sapphire for being able to keep the more power-hungry Radeon R9 390 down to just 73°C under load.
And that's with a cooler that doesn't sound like a wailing banshee when under the hammer. Sapphire, as usual, does a good job with the silicon it has to work with. In the interests of conjecture, it would be good to see what the Nitro/Tri-X cooler could do on a GTX 970.
The fans switch off at low loads and, thankfully, don't oscillate between on and off when the PC is idling.
