Refund: R9 390 uses more power than a GTX 970

I don't know either. All I know is I got the damn beeper to stop alarming by using 3.6Ghz @ 1.0V on the CPU. Once the beeper was off, the system was more stable.

I'm sorry but clearly you don't have a degree in electrical engineering. So I don't see how your degree is relevant :p

It sounds like you got a defective card. Part of it could also be overloading the UPS causing issues with power delivery at load.

Your idle wattage is absurdly high, and your load wattage is high as well.

The UPS affects it because the power delivery is likely inverter based, not wall based, meaning the output power runs off the batteries all the time, and too heavy of a load causes it to whine and cry.

Actually let place my two cents. Power consumption is non agrument. Psu can support it? Your are talking about performance . So not worried about the power bill class ? Which is so small as to not matter. Building oc'ing rig ? 8350 under load is less than 50 c can your intel do that ? I mean banging the crap out of as many threats as possible ? Sapphire has made some of the coolest running gpu's ? I have ever seen not watercooled.

Just going to copy/paste something that i posted on a different topic...

Jason_Thongphetmanic
In my testing...

R9 390X: 380 to 410w total system load. (Stock)

GTX 980ti: 360 to 390w total system load.(OC'ed)

GTX 970: 240 to 270w total system load.(stock)

A non-x 390 probably won't be as high as a 390x, but it's not going to be a huge amount lower.

The GTX 970 uses quite a bit more than 200w. At full load, it'll use closer to the 300w mark. Just shy of it though. Tested it with my current PC, 4790k @ 4.8ghz 1.29v, 12 fans, 2 SSDs, etc...

Your current PC draws more power than my PC. 4690K @ 4.5ghz 1.25v, 6 fans. I am only reporting the results I saw on my rig with my test. I can not verify the accuracy of my testing because I did not use a calibrated testing device.

I found that by reducing voltage from 1.25v to 1.00v I dropped power by 50 watts. I am not an electrical engineer. Most engineers do have to take courses in electronics and are smart people that can figure things out. I'm no expert, but I haven't been shocked lately either.

I do not believe that the AMD Radeon R9 390 should be compared to the Nvidia Geforce GTX 970. It is a closer competitor to the GTX 980 at a much lower price.

Noise:
I really considered the Fury cards but my friend says the first generation Nano has coil whine. My Geforce cards have always had coil whine and the 660's were really loud. The coil whine on the R9 was super annoying also. My last few cards were the EVGA GTX 9600, GTX 465, GTX 660 FTW Signature 2. The 465 was super hot and the fan got super loud trying to keep up. It would crash all the time if it hit 80C. I fixed it by screwing a 92mm fan over top of the squirrel cage fan = my Double-Turbo cooler solution. I also upgraded to the 700w PSU needed for this card. That's how old my PSU is. I got the 660 to play FarCry 3 and got the 2nd one when I upgraded the motherboard to an i5. The 660 ran quieter, cooler and now I prefer dual-fan into-the-case GPU coolers. The coil whine was worse than the 465 though. I stopped playing UT2004 because that title made the 660's electronics scream.

On the 970 it seems that the Nvidia engineers have finally refined the coil whine problem out of existence.

the power draw of any card highly depends on cooling type, and design of pcb. Since 970 and 390 respectively, have many different versions of pcb's - it wouldn't be surprise to find that one card may use less or more than what is shown in benchmarks or per any of the reviews over.

msi le 290x, can easily take 400W +, while 290x gigabyte windforce takes 250-350W; all is highly dependent on its design.

on the other hand you will find 970's that will take 400W too... you just need to go far enough.

Maybe this is true for reference designs, I'm not sure, but the coil whine on my G1 Gaming 970 is pretty considerable.

I initially thought there might have been something wrong with the card, but its worked flawlessly. I limit this card to 120fps mostly because the coil whine at really high framerates makes me nervous lol.

Let us take note: A 390 is between a 970 and a 980. The TDP is going to be high because it is a pretty high area card. If the TDP is even higher then thats what you get for buying openbox.

I'm sorry, but why are we blaming the customer here?

There are any number of reasons why something might be open box. If the retailer has sold you a product and was aware of the fact that it has issues, and hasn't specified it is being sold "as-is", then that is pretty shady. The customer has every right to expect a fully functional product if the only caveat is "open box".

A poor choice of words on my part again. The noise seems reduced to the level where my case can silence it, would have been a more reasonable statement.

120 fps sounds nice. I guess It all depends on the frame rate that makes your card resonate. I use a 60hz graphics monitor and I have to leave V-sync on to prevent tearing.

As for the open box:
Micro Center said it was tested functional and I had 30 days to return it.
After 2 days I decided to exchange. It took 1 hour to uninstall the AMD, drive there, pay $60 more for a less powerful Nvidia GPU, drive home and re-install.

You can thank Nvidia for that they purposely made it so AMD doesn't just work after you've had nvidia, part of their scheme of anticompetitiveness to get the sheep to stay with Nvidia. Looks like it worked on you. Have fun with 3.5 GB :D

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Another of Nvidia's schemes was to hide black screening 290/X's in the first few batches and change official AMD statements to say it was a driver error and would be fixed and wasn't really a problem, They tricked me that way.
Now I'm stuck with a GTX970 that I have to do MY OWN overclocking on instead of the 290 where it was already done for me since AMD cards are already pushed to their limit from the factory.
Damn Nvidia!

I had issues with Just Cause 3 when it launched because it was a mess on AMD, besides that I never had a problem with my 390. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the Bulletstorm PC version problematic anyway and still is to this day?

lol truth is you expect nvida to work 9 times out of 10 because of the money you shell out for it. any amd users perspective is that for a lower price i am WILLING to work to make my experience a 'good' / equal one. minor research would have saved you a lot of trouble. also imo you should have run your tests on a vm. blank slate no blaming required.

imo the 390 is an impressive card because of how old it is. nvidia has over the years done the opposite. each gen gets nerfed so you can pay them obscene amounts of money to 'fix' the issue via an upgrade. gone are the days where you could keep using the same card for up to 5 years.

case in point the 700 series. ;)

also your ups is the outlier here. you can't blame a card that has been tested and branded power hungry if you don't have the backend to support that thirst.

you are free to choose what you want. in that regard you may not be sheeple. but to outright slate a much more open competitor and less evil one at that is to be part of a flock. a flock on the verge of organised religion.

sure nvidia can take your money and give you the eden you've been looking for. OR you can always bury the prejudice and work towards your own eden. i've saved my self alot of pain and gone with a 7870. and tbh i don't think i'll ever pay nvidia to give me what should be a standard experience for much lesser money.

sincerely,
a former disgruntled 780ti user

I'm running a r9 390 off 600W fine. Perhaps you have a faulty card.

no bulletstorm worked flawlessly on amd 7970+.

could be a lot of issues here from what im reading but ill lay my ideas and experiences out:
sounds like the UPS is causing some delivery issues; others above have stated that;
it might very well be that the ''open box'' card may have a low ASIC quality leading to some voltage leakage
it could also very well be the power supply maybe causing issues; lot of variables to consider here

now from my experience: i am a proud owner of the big brother to the 390; the 390x of the saphire nitro variety, a 4690k like yours albiet not overclocked, but i am running a 500w evga 80+ PSU and i haven't hit the 500w threshhold yet on my 390x; according to my Killawatt draw measurer im running about 375-425 watts full tilt in blade and soul
now i got a gtx 970 for a freind whom was hell bent on nvidia; used his ssd and got a fresh install of windows and drivers; and ran blade and soul in the same areas at the same settings for consistency and Killawatt reported 350-374 watts; just for comparative information

not my place to point fingers at NV, AMD, or you but there might be a combination of issues

just in the future; check with another card of the same type and see what happens b/c its very odd for a 390 to do this even from an open box area

Did I just miss it or did you just not give a reason why you don't like the 390? It draws more power and maybe gets a bit hotter, but that are pretty much the only downsides and the Sapphire cooler handles the heat pretty good so I don't see why someone wouldn't like it unless they have a tiny case or too weak psu and not enough money to upgrade that too.

I was having trouble with the MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G and I gave up making excuses for having issues. I think the issue is: I need a bigger battery backup UPS. I could have tried another 390, or a new PSU, or a new UPS or wiped a fresh install of Windows. Getting the 970 was the least expensive solution that was sure to work. I bet if I considered leaving my PC unprotected and plugging it straight into the wall, my old PSU + 390 would have worked. I did get the 390 to work with minimal power, but I had to un-clock my CPU to do it.

Bulletstorm always ran great. The problem is it is a Nvidia PhysX title and it didn't like AMD.

So is the TLDR version that Joker was right? :P

Nice build man, looks solid :)

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