Introduction

Since we were able to procure our own retail board, we can finally take a much closer look at different aspects of the card’s power consumption. Our findings prove to be very interesting indeed! Furthermore, we’ve also taken several days to analyze the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X’s pump and the annoying noises that it produces. Even more interesting findings await!

We’re using the same benchmark system that we used for our AMD Radeon R9 Fury X launch article. However, we’ve tweaked it a bit. The idle power consumption’s now being measured using a system that has a lot of the software on it that tends to accumulate over time. Last time, the system was completely “fresh.” This time around, linear interpolation was applied to the data by the oscilloscope, and not when it was analyzed.

The biggest change, which we’ll stick with for all future launch articles as well, concerns the content, though.

We’ll look at power consumption in direct relation to gaming performance, and we’ll do so separately for 1920x1080 and 3840x2160, since there are major differences between the two. We’ll also look at several different games, and even run some of them with different settings, such as tessellation. In addition, we’ve added some applications that aren’t related to gaming. Life’s not always just about gaming, after all.

Bear in mind that these tests are merely snapshots in specific applications. A benchmark not part of our suite will likely fall somewhere between our average figure and the torture test peak. There are no absolutes these days; best estimates will always consist of a range.