Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a couple of final data points -- namely, power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored acoustics and tracked how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea of how much power each configuration used while idling and also while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

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Total System Power Consumption
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Tested at the Outlet
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The Radeon R9 390's power consumption is right in-line with the 290X. Idle power seems to have been improved slightly, despite the doubling of the memory capacity, but we're only talking a few watts here.
In terms of noise output, the Powercolor PCS+ Radeon R9 390 we tested was slightly quieter than AMD's reference cards, but was nowhere near as quiet as NVIDIA's current offerings.