ASUS Radeon R9-290X DirectCU II OC review - Product Photos

The card has a maximum power consumption of give or take 280~290 Watts, AMD will actually not formally disclose that information specifically but our measurements actually show these numbers under full gaming load. The board's overall power consumption from idle to load is excellent really, roughly 10 Watt in idle and when the monitor goes into sleep mode just 3 Watt. it is a nice looking card alright. 

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 290X 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 of course.

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, voltage read points at the back which are visible through the back-plate.

There's also a dual BIOS. On the reference cards for an uber and Quiet mode. For this ASUS card that is eliminated due to the proper cooling. So see the 2nd BIOS as a fails-safe BIOS.