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. See details of our power consumption testing procedure on the test systems and procedures page.
It’s a really nice looking cooler. I see it has Xfire connectors, I thought AMD cards ‘Xfired’ through the PCIe slots nowadays. Boy it just goes to show how out of the loop I am as far as AMD goes. I think the last AMD GFX card I tested was a HD 5770.
Just to think I Recently built an AMD machine with a single R9 290X and never even noticed if it had Xfire connectors or not.
That would the Hybrid CrossFire feature. This was limited to the new GPUs AFAIK which means the R9 290X and R9 290 and R9 295X2 if that comes out. I think all the old rebranded GPUs still need a physical connector.
Edit: I believe it is called DMA not Hybrid CFX, no idea why I said that. Get confused easily
Thanks for clearing that up. Apart from building the odd AMD machine, I really don’t have much to do with them.
I want to replace my R9 270 with this thing because of fascist game developer companies pushing horribly optimized games off as demanding graphical accomplishments (like a creed unity) When they do not look any better than games from 2010! So I want a card with at’least 3GB to run 1080p. And I thought since this model if the 280 is priced very well and has a decent power upgrade from my 270, That it would be great. But for some reason this thing is almost a foot long! WTH? It is not a R9 290! It does not need a cooler this dam long! I am going to have to remove my HDD cage and shorten it just to make it fit!
I purchased one of these for $159 after rebate on newegg(I’ve seen them get down to 149) and must be honest – WOW, this card has got to be the price to performance champion! I just sold my watercooled/overclocked gigabyte r9 290x oc edition to put some money toward the new 390 and wanted something cheap to hold me over for the spring/summer. This card has performed beyond my expectations. 1150mhz core/1400 memory without any voltage added, and it easily hits the 1200mhz board max with stability. It cools well even in my terribly confined case, but most importantly it games at 1080 like a champ.