What is the ghost 3.0+ open thermal design on the box?
Huh, so system integrators insisted on the blower style? Yikes.Chiming in...
There was a demand for blower style in the new mini and micro case designs that wanted direct rear ventilation. Ultimately, proper case flow would resolve the DD radiant cooling design, but system integrators insisted on the blower style... The run of them isn't going to be too large and wont likely be available at the major retailers. I personally tested one, reminded me very much of the 290 reference. Once the reference 290's ran out, we had no single rear-exhaust fans left to sell for over a year, so this was made to bridge the gap.
Mark at XFX
It also says it's a blower on the box.
http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/produ.../radeon-r9-390x-1050mhz-4gb-ddr5-r9-390x-8bd6
With how much restriction there is on the exit, that thing is going to be LOUD.
It also says it's a blower on the box.
http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/produ.../radeon-r9-390x-1050mhz-4gb-ddr5-r9-390x-8bd6
With how much restriction there is on the exit, that thing is going to be LOUD.
It'll throttle with, or without that restriction on the back.
The 390 is clocked higher than the 290 (plus some more voltage), and that card already struggled with the blower of hell under a more forgiving load... unless there's a different heatsink under that shroud, something I doubt.
Well, set the fan to 100 and it won't throttle. I got my XFX 290 up to 1050MHz on the stock cooler in Furmark (and Litecoin mining 24/7), though the 290 backplate has a lot less restiction.
Removing the back bracket entirely makes a noticeable difference in temperatures at a fixed fan speed though. Not particularly useful for anyone using a standard tower case unless you're willing to butcher the bracket, but prior to putting mine under water it helped a little to keep noise down with auto fan.
Well, that was a boring show of basically nothing that took two hours of benchmarking to put together. The take away here is that our mod had little to no effect on the performance of the R9 290X in the benchmarks we looked at.
All is not lost though, as our little mod did conclusively reduce the noise profile of the R9 290X even if it didnt boost performance. The drawback to our mod is that in PCs where the motherboard is positioned vertically users may see a modded R9 290 wiggle around in their case a bit more because theres no longer a back-panel bracket to hold the card in place. A longer term fix for this issue would be to remove the sections of the panel constraining air flow while retaining the case mount on the bracket. But if you ever had to RMA your 290X it might be difficult to explain why your modded back-panel doesnt void your warranty.