R9 290X Overclocked Power Consumption

[Jokester]

Has anyone overclocked their card yet and also monitored the increase in power consumption using a wall socket monitor?

There was a review that seemed to suggest overclocking to 1200MHz with some extra volts increased the cards consumption from ~250W to nearer ~400W. Wondering if anyone else has similar experiences of seeing a 150W increase in power?

 

[Marine-RX179]

Has anyone overclocked their card yet and also monitored the increase in power consumption using a wall socket monitor?

There was a review that seemed to suggest overclocking to 1200MHz with some extra volts increased the cards consumption from ~250W to nearer ~400W. Wondering if anyone else has similar experiences of seeing a 150W increase in power?

You could ask in Gibbo's review thread, since he's already done that overclock...just try asking him about the power consumption.

 

[Gibbo]

I never measured at the wall. But these things do need the best PSU's for overclocking and preventing any coil whine.

 

[peahead]

coil whine is down to the quality of the PSU and not the card ?

 

[mmj_uk]

coil whine is down to the quality of the PSU and not the card ?

No,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-review-benchmark,3486-2.html

But I was surprised at just how much noise the card’s inductors generated—like, I couldn’t believe an engineer would kick something like that out the door and expect someone to pay a grand for it.

To a lesser degree, the Radeon HD 7990 runs into something similar. AMD explained it to me as an artifact of oscillation between heavy and light workloads, where current draw spikes and dips, causing ceramic capacitors and the PCB itself to vibrate. The volume and tone of this phenomenon vary according to the task you’re performing, but it was noticeable enough during our real-world game testing with Bakersfield-based volunteers that several asked me to explain what was happening.

The solution is to turn on v-sync, capping the frame rate and preventing those highly variable loads. I don’t think it’s particularly ideal to have to use v-sync, but there it is.