R9 290 Windforce throttles ALOT on load!

[Romeru]

Hello at Tom's, I'm an owner of an R9 290 windforce from Gigabyte. Specifically the OC version at 1040/1250mhz.

When using this I'd hit 84c within a few minutes in all new games and then it'd throttle it's clock speeds frequently. The fan speed stayed at around 55%.

I saw an bios update on Gigabytes website and flashed it, it said it added "performance mode support" and so it did. When I booted up a second time my idle fan speed had increased to around 30% compared to 20%.

My temperatures were the same on idle though. When starting a game I know end up at 80c on load but the temperatuers slowly catched up to 83c. And the fan, well it went all the way up to 84% constantly which is pretty loud I'd say.

But it doesn't throttle as much but it's extremely loud. Probably as loud as a r9 290 reference.
I've contacted gigabyte regarding this but has anyone else had this problem if they own the windforce model?

My airflow is fine.

Thanks for help.

 

[jossrik]

I just bought a 290x windforce from the egg, and I like it, my fan spins quite fast, as much as 70 - 80 % when mining on full blast, but my temps stay right around 70C. Maybe ambient is part of the problem. Is it hot where the computer is? If it's not the ambient temp double check for dust or whatnot constricting airflow. You could also hit the bios select switch for the uber mode (I don't remember if that's what it comes set at or not, but you don't want it on quiet mode). The 290/290Xs do run hotter than most cards, they're designed to. If I remember reading right, the 290/290X cards are supposed to throttle at 85, not the 95 that the reference cards throttled at. Don't quote me on that though, I can't remember if that's right or some crackhead said it on a forum.

 

[Romeru]

For my card 85c is the max temp before it throttles. I hit 87% constantly in bf4. My ambient room temperature is 23-24c in Sweden.
Most benchmarks I see hit 80c or above. But still...