XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB Video Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition OC 8GB Idle and Load Temps:

When it comes to temperatures the XFX Radeon R9 390 Black Edition idled at 28C on our open air test bench and got up to 72C when gaming for over an hour non-stop. The VRM Temperatures were 75C on VRM 1 and 68C on VRM 2. It might come to a shock to a few folks that the power components get hotter than the GPU core itself, but this is the reason why XFX placed heatsinks on them and 75C isn’t that bad.

Here is a chart that shows the temperatures of the XFX Radeon R9 390 versus some other high-end desktop cards.

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 XFX Radeon R9 Nano is one of the loudest cards that we have tested in recent weeks. The cards fan spin at all times, so it’s obviously going to be louder than many of the models on the chart that have passive 0dB fan solutions at idle. When gaming the cards twin fans spin up to 2230 RPM and just happen to be the loudest GPU cooler of the eight that we have tested. This is a card that you will hear from inside your case when you are gaming.

** The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X reference card that we are using was the original model with a loud water pump that whines. AMD changed the pump design before the cards hit the retail market, but wasn’t willing to replace ours. We expect retail cards to perform quieter for this and hopefully AMD will send us a replacement card for proper noise testing. **