Power Consumption Overview
AMD Radeon R9 290X Correction
Ultimately, any piece of equipment can fail, and this is what happened to our current clamp while we were benchmarking the Radeon R9 290X. That means some of the power consumption results in our launch article weren't quite right. Power was one of the last things we measured, and not only are the Radeon R9 290X’s numbers for the gaming loop too low, but the error got worse with time, increasingly throwing off the curve. Thus, we're repeating our readings on the 290X and presenting the corrected curve below. Also, we've taken steps so this doesn't happen again, using additional equipment and comparing the results through different methods.
On the bright side, the Radeon R9 290X we're using for our new power consumption benchmark isn’t a press sample sent to us by AMD, but an off-the-shelf retail card.
Power Consumption Overview for All Graphics Cards
Here are the power consumption numbers for all of the benchmarked graphics cards, including the corrected Radeon R9 290X results.
Bottom Line
Once again, the Radeon R9 290X’s power consumption at idle is very high, and it gets a lot worse when a second or third monitor is connected. The Blu-ray playback results are also far from satisfactory. Things get a lot better when it comes to gaming loops, where the Radeon R9 290X is much improved over AMD’s Tahiti. This lets it gain a lot of ground on the more efficient Nvidia graphics cards. Seeing that the gap is really not that large any more, what remains might eventually even be eliminated completely with performance increases due to driver optimizations.