AMD Radeon R9 295X2 8GB Video Card Review at 4K Ultra HD

Temperature & Noise Testing

Temperatures are important to enthusiasts and gamers, so we took a bit of time and did some temperature testing on the water cooled AMD Radeon R9 295X2 video card.

AMD Radeon R9 295X2 8GB Temps:

At idle we got an impressive 26C and when gaming we hit a high of 63C. This means that between idle and load there is a modest 37C rise in temperatures. GPU-Z shows that the XFX DD Radeon R9 290 video card had an GPU voltage of 0.944V at idle and 1.238V when at full load running 3D games. The VDDC current was 5.7 Amps at idle and 138.1 Amps at load, while the power was 5.9 Watts at idle and 152.1 Watts at load.

We don’t own a FLIR infrared camera, but our non-contact laser directed infrared thermometer and it showed that we were running 88C on the back of the card behind where the VRM area is located. We took this reading after BF4 was running for half an hour on our open air test bench. No air is circulating behind the card, so we were actually pleasantly surprised with this measurement as we were expecting it to be higher. It would have been nice AMD would have put together a full coverage water block as that would have keep the VRM’s much cooler, but that would have added R&D time and likely a higher price tag.

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

The additional fan noise from the cards radiator helped this card have the highest average idle noise level of all of cards that we have recently looked at. The fan noise actually wasn’t that bad though at full load and was actually quieter than the Gigabyte and PowerColor setups that feature cards with triple fan coolers on them. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti GHz Edition 2-way SLI setup for example had six fans spun up while gaming and easily topped the charts.