Testing

Our previous Radeon R9 290x testing included numbers for Unigine's Valley benchmark. This stresses the card for prolonged periods, allowing the thermal throttling to come into play - something that might not always be evident in shorter game benchmarks but is likely to offer similar results to extensive gaming sessions.


Going from our original air-cooled BitFenix Prodigy to an open-test system or water-cooled tower isn't exactly a fair comparision, so we used the Prodigy again, creating a typical system including a large Magicool 180mm-fan radiator with a 180mm SilverStone Air Penetrator fan - a typical water-cooled scenario in the Prodigy. To further replicate a typical system, we also included an overclocked Intel Core i5-3570K, overclocked to 4.2GHz, and water-cooled by Bitspower's AIZ77ITXD waterblock. The cooling loop also included a Laing DDC pump with Alphacool top reservoir and a 120mm top exhaust fan.

To save amassing hundreds of results, and as we're mainly concerned with the water-cooled numbers, we've only compared the air-cooled model at 40% and 100% fan speed limits. In the Unigine test, we've tied the corresponding overclock settings in the same colour, so you can see how water cooling compares to a stock card at 40% and 100% fan speed, while the additional overclock we achieved thanks to water cooling is in orange and a stock speed GeForce GTX 780 3GB is shown in light blue.