Power Consumption & Temperatures
As expected, when at idle Gigabyte's overclocked Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 graphics cards provided the same 62W system consumption figures as AMD's reference cards.
Our first load test was conducted using Crysis 3 and along with consuming roughly as much power as their AMD reference equivalents, Gigabyte's R9 290 OC and R9 290X OC consumed roughly as much power as one another while using almost 10W less than Palit's GTX 780 Ti JetStream.
When testing with Max Payne 3, the R9 290 OC and R9 290X OC again consumed a similar amount of power at 310 to 312W, which was also around 40W more than the GTX 780 Ti JetStream.
Sleeping Dogs shows similar consumption trends to those from Max Payne 3 with Gigabyte's Radeons consuming about 350W each or 30W more than the GTX 780 Ti JetStream.
With most high-end GPU typically operating at around 80 degrees when under load, we were naturally concerned when AMD's reference R9 290 and R9 290X quickly hit 95 degrees. Thankfully, these Gigabyte WindForce cards do a better job of staying in line with the GTX 780 Ti and other high-end cards at 84 degrees.
What impresses us the most is how quiet Gigabyte's cards run, as they were inaudible over the test system's two 120mm case fans, which are also very quiet. From FurMark to seemingly every game, Gigabyte's cards remain whisper quiet under load.