Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X 8GB CrossFireX Review

Power Consumption

With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of three different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load.

Here things start to get interesting. Throughout the tests, we have seen the CFX configuration trading places with the R9 295×2, yet here, we see it consumes around 25% less power. And when compared to the single card, we are seeing around 80% performance increase with only around 33% more power demand, which is obviously very good.