AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Power Consumption

AMD Radeon R9 290X PCIe Power Connectors

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Kill-A-Watt power meter. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers we ran three games at 1920×1080 and averaged the peak results seen on the power meter.

power-consumption

Power Consumption Results: The entire platform with the AMD Radeon R9 290 installed was consuming 111 Watts at idle and hit a maximum of 437 Watts when gaming. We’d expect all AMD Radeon R9 290 and 290X cards to consume about the same power at idle with the only difference being the variance between GPU’s, but at gaming load we found the R9 290 using slightly less power since less compute units are active.