PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB Video Card Review

Power Consumption

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 Battlefield 4 at 3840×2160 and recorded the average idle reading and the peak gaming reading on the power meter.

Power Consumption Results: We half expected the PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X to top the power consumption chart, but was pleasantly surprised to see that it did not. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti GHz Edition still holds the coveted most power used slot with 116 Watts at idle and 512 Watts at load. The PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290X system came in at 118 Watts and idle and 479 Watts when gaming. 30 Watts is not a huge difference when you are pulling down roughly 500W of power from the grid when gaming, but it is worth noting!