Product Photos
The card has a maximum power consumption of give or take 250 Watts, AMD will actually not formally disclose that information specifically but our measurements show numbers close to that under full gaming load. The board's overall power consumption from idle to load is excellent really, roughly 10 Watts in idle and when the monitor goes into sleep mode just 3 Watts.
At the rear side of the card we see a rather clean PCB, yup, blocked by the backplate. The PCB is custom and is based on ASUS’s Super Alloy Power technology and comes with an 8-Phase DIGI+ VRM power delivery which gives the core enough power to overclock and run with maximum stability. The GPU gets 6 power dedicated phases BTW.
You will need to hook the 290 card up to your power supply with one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe PEG connector. We recommend a 550~600W power supply to start with, with one card installed. Always keep a little in reserve for overclocking CPU and GPU and next to that, do realize that a power supply is most efficient at 50% of its maximum capacity.
The back of the PCB comes with specialized SAP CAPs which increase the overclocking headroom while the custom concrete alloy chokes help reduce the buzzing noise produced on reference variants. You'll spot that the card was designed for ASUS ROG features as well, with voltage read points at the back which are visible through the backplate.
There's also a dual BIOS on the reference cards for both an uber and quiet mode. For this ASUS card that is eliminated due to the proper cooling. So see the 2nd BIOS as a fail-safe BIOS.