AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux

Besides the Radeon R9 290 frequently losing out to the GeForce GTX 680, the noise level of this Hawaii graphics card was rather noisy. This $420 USD graphics card from XFX was among the noisiest graphics cards I've ever encountered. Besides being noisy, the graphics card was running very hot too.

When running Furmark on the graphics card and measuring the temperature automatically with the Phoronix Test Suite reading the temperatures using the binary AMD / NVIDIA drivers, the R9 290 was worst. The Radeon R9 290 had an average temperature of 87 Celsius! This could also explain why the R9 290 Linux performance is so disappointing if thermal throttling is kicking in for the graphics card. The GPU temperature had topped out at 96 Celsius! This graphics card was running in an open-air system with the room temperature being maintained and the XFX graphics card temperatures were blowing well past the other nine tested GPUs. The GeForce GTX 680 that was generally delivering higher frame-rates in this testing had an average temperature of 75 Celsius.

The system power consumption was also at its highest point when running the Radeon R9 290. AC power consumption for the system was monitored using a WattsUp USB power meter. The overall system power consumption averaged out to 362 Watts for the R9 290 while the system power consumption with the GeForce GTX 680 was 298 Watts.

When having the Phoronix Test Suite calculate the performance-per-Watt in Furmark, the Radeon R9 290 loses out to the Radeon R9 270X that was delivering slightly better performance per Watt. The R9 290 did come out a tiny bit better than the GeForce GTX 680 in performance-per-Watt.