ASUS Radeon R9-290 DirectCU II OC review - Hardware Setup | Power Consumption

Hardware Installation

Installation of any of the AMD Radeon cards is really easy. Once the card is seated into the PC make sure you hook up the monitor and of course any external power connectors like 6 and/or 8-pin PEG power connectors. Preferably get yourself a power supply that has these PCIe PEG connectors native (converting them from a Molex Peripheral connector anno 2014 we feel is a no-go).

• Download AMD Radeon drivers

Once done, we boot into Windows, install the latest AMD Catalyst drivers and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed unless you like to tweak the settings, for which you can open the Catalyst Control Center.

Power Consumption

Let's have a look at how much power draw we measure with this graphics card installed. The methodology: we have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. We simply stress the GPU, not the processor. The before and after wattage will tell us roughly how much power a graphics card is consuming under load. Our test system is based on a power hungry six-core Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E based setup on the X79 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.60 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We'll be calculating the GPU power consumption here, not the total PC power consumption.

Power consumption ASUS Radeon R9-290X

Above, we have a chart of relative power consumption. Again the Wattage shown is the card with the GPU(s) stressed 100%, showing only the peak GPU power draw, not the power consumption of the entire PC and not the average gaming power consumption either.

Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:

• AMD R9-290 - On your average system the card requires you to have a 550~600 Watt power supply unit.
• AMD R9-290 Crossfire - On your average system the cards require you to have a 800 Watt power supply unit at a minimum.

If you are going to overclock the GPU or processor, then we do recommend you purchase something with some more stamina. There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load:

• Bad 3D performance
• Crashing games
• Spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• Freezing during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

Let's move to the next page where we'll look into GPU heat levels and noise levels coming from this graphics card.