Idle and Multi-Monitor Loads
The Radeon R9 290X’s power consumption at idle is surprisingly high. Even though AMD makes a point of highlighting its ZeroCore Power feature, which does drop the card to a miserly 5 to 6 W, you only enjoy the benefit of this when your monitor is in suspend mode. As soon as the desktop becomes active, power consumption jumps to 20 W with one monitor connected. Connect two and you’re looking at 57 W. Three monitors take you all the way up to 59 W. This means that the R9 290X consumes more power than two overclocked GeForce GTX 780s in SLI with more than one monitor attached.


Hardware Accelerated Video Output
During Blu-ray playback (or other accelerated video work), AMD's Radeon R9 290X consumes 70 W. This is bizarre, since the Radeon R7 240 does the same thing under 17 W. AMD clearly has some driver work to do still.

Onwards and Upwards: Gaming
After that negative attention, PowerTune kicks in to do the job it's supposed to do. The technology makes its adjustments so quickly that it's difficult to express average power consumption using one number. There's a lot of variation, and the reading changes based on several factors.
Because we can't be as objective as we'd want, we're providing a range instead. To achieve this, we left the power limit alone in CCC and lowered the board's target temperature to 70 degrees Celsius. The resulting cooling performance is about on par with what AMD’s partners offer on existing cards in the same thermal class, giving us a preview of what they might achieve with their own cooling solutions and R9 290X.
Power figures between 185 and 218 W are pretty darned good in the ultra-high-end segment. In light of these results, I think we can forgive the idle numbers we recorded earlier.

When Push Comes to Shove: The Peak Values
If you want to take the Radeon R9 290X to its limits, then you need to push it hard by increasing its power limit and dropping the target temperature. Under those conditions, it's possible to exceed 300 W. We even saw 335 W from the card, though that's probably not at all something you want to reproduce.
The 225 W we measured using a compute-heavy load and stock settings can be pushed as high as 295 W by giving the fan more room to spin up and targeting a lower thermal ceiling. Unfortunately, those conditions don't last. Once the Radeon R9 290X hits its target temperature, power consumption drops considerably. This explains the card’s relatively low performance in our GPGPU benchmarks.

- Hawaii: A 6.2 Billion Transistor GPU For Gaming
- CrossFire: Farewell Bridge Connector; Hello DMA
- TrueAudio: Dedicated Resources For Sound Processing
- PowerTune: Balancing Performance And Acoustics
- Overclocking: PowerTune Changes Things
- The Radeon R9 290X
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Arma III At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: Arma III At 3840x2160
- Results: Battlefield 3 At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: Battlefield 3 At 3840x2160
- Results: BioShock Infinite At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: BioShock Infinite At 3840x2160
- Results: Crysis 3 At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: Crysis 3 At 3840x2160
- Results: Metro: Last Light At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: Metro: Last Light At 3840x2160
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim At 3840x2160
- Results: Tomb Raider At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
- Results: Tomb Raider At 3840x2160
- CrossFire: Arma III At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: Battlefield 3 At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: BioShock Infinite At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: Crysis 3 At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: Metro: Last Light At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim At 7680x1440
- CrossFire: Tomb Raider At 7680x1440
- Power Consumption
- Noise
- CAD: AutoCAD 2013
- CAD: Autodesk Inventor 2013
- OpenGL: Maya 2013 And LightWave
- OpenCL: Bitmining, LuxMark, And RatGPU
- R9 290X: A Taste Of Paradise That Won’t Break The Bank
I will be buying 2X 290X with 2X water blocks
I cant believe Anandtech article still isn't up... They cant seem to make their minds up.. dodgy as hell
When they said the reverberations calculasions for the environment would take 15% of a CPU core, they meant for one sound where as the audio dsp can do it for hundreds with lower latency which is why even a current high end CPU cannot do what aureal did and now what amd is picking back up on.
But if it altering vcore how does that impact your overclock stability.....I'm interested as I've got an extreme cooling solution (complete submersion in -30c phase change liquid).
"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU PLAY, JUST PLAY IT LOUD, OK?"
"Didn't you used to be in artillery, Bob?"
"NO, JUST GOT A R9 290!"
"OK, for you Bob, here's Paint It Black by the awesome Rolling Stones!"
Put them both under water and crank to the maximum and then see what we have. Yes, the 290X is arguably the best card now at stock, but I'm inclined to believe the Titan is still the greatest card overall.
When I saw the specs of the Titan I honestly thought it would change everything but it has just showed how arrogant nVidia is right now to think it's worth £850+ when even their own GTX 780 at £500ish beats it on occasion. nVidia you're not intel, not even close so stop acting like it or you WILL get burned!
Kudos to AMD for fighting back with a high performance, low cost option. Who cares if it's loud, 3rd parties will take care of that, the important thing is nVidia drops their prices to match.
Now AMD just needs to release a PCIe 3.0 motherboard to use this card with their CPU range. Why haven't you already AMD? WHY?
It's not arrogance from Nvidia to produce the Titan, far from it. The Titan was always intended to be a technical exercise in the very best they could produce, much like the GTX 690 was. As a result, the Titan's price was intentionally inflated, again just like the 690.
But Nvidia didn't see the Titan becoming so popular, hence it became a full production card.
The kick comes from the GTX 780 being a cut-down Titan and hence near matching the performance. I should image the GTX 780 Ti will be the same as the Titan, just without 6GB RAM.
The Titan raised the bar and gave AMD something to aim at. And with the 6GB RAM onboard, I still don't see the Titan's price coming down - you STILL need that much RAM to 4K game properly.
but AMD have saved the day again ... the R7 and R9 series now give the average gamer a chance to experience high resolution gaming without having to mortgage the house or sell the car !
when the board partners start to release their own versions of the new AMD cards then you will see better cooling solutions and more competitive prices ....and that's good news for us everyday "cash strapped" gamers
however the most interesting aspect of the R7 and R9 cards is the mantle support ... this may turn out to be a evolution in the way your graphic card operates .. and battlefield 4 will be the first game to support mantle ( around dec 2013 )
excellent review !
together with new, improved drivers - there's great potential.
But take a note: Nvidia is not sitting still...let the Battle of Titan's begin!!
Typo.
Although sometimes my Titan only reports 4GB
Can't wait!