PowerColor R9 290 Review

Test Setup

PowerColor R9 290
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.6GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64

Temperatures

To the surprise of nobody the R9 290 runs at a toasty 95°C. We understand that this is a deliberate design decision by AMD, but it doesn’t mean that we have to like it. All that heat has to go somewhere, and ‘into the case’ is hardly the place we want it to be. Any time a manufacturer greatly increases the standard running temperature of a product we’re far more likely to conclude that they couldn’t keep the temperatures in check, rather than have over-engineered their unit to handle higher temps.