XFX Radeon R9 290 DD Black Edition High Temperatures

ginja

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Sep 12, 2014
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Recently built a new gaming system (full spec below) fired up Sniper Elite and World of Tanks last night to my horror the GPU was running at over 90C peaked at 95C, I set the fan at 100% but this made no difference, does anyone have any suggestions or advice about what is wrong or what I can do? Is the card faulty? I assume this is not going to be healthy for my system?

Thanks in advance for your help, if you need any more info just ask.

GPU: XFX Radeon R9 290 DD Black Edition
Motherboard: MSI Z97M Gaming
CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz
Cooler: Corsair H90
Memory 4x Crucial 4GB
PSU: Corsair CX600M
HDD: Crucial SSD 960GB

*UPDATE*
Thank you for all your help on this, it was really useful and over the weekend I managed to get the temperature down to a much more sensible level.
 
Solution
R9 290 can run at 95C but it is not optimal for the owners of R9 290. Try setting up a global Vsync to cap your fps at 75fps. MSI afterburner has that option.
Hello, We're sorry you are having issues with your 290.

If you are running fans at 100% and temps are still at 95'C.... i would bet one of the fans is failing. Have you inspected it yet? a simple finger/flick test on each fan would suffice.

We can help you fix this.

Please PM me here, or make a ticket at xfxsupport.com.
 
In the AMD Catalyst drivers, if you did nothing other than change the setting allowing the fans to spin up to 100%, then the thermal limit is still set to 94C (stock setting). That means the GPU will always go up to 94C and then the fans will spin up to maintain this temperature as a maximum limit. If you had water cooling or some other really good cooling, then the GPU may never reach 94C, even with a full 100%GPU load.

The reference cards work this way with their stock cooling. They will go up to 94C and then the fans will increase to maintain that temp withoout throttling the core or memory clocks. If it hits 94C and the fans are at 100%, and the temperature isn't being controlled, then they will throttle to maintain the 94C maximum.

Use MSI afterburner to see if your core and vram clocks get throttled with the GPU at 94C and the fans at 100%.

If you don't want the GPU to run that hot, then turn the max down to something lower, then the fans will just kick on a little sooner and run faster.

I have 2 XFX Core Edition R9 290's in crossfire, and at 7680x1440 in Assetto Corsa they always run at 100% fan speed, but the GPU stays at 94C and does not throttle. And that's t 60fps with V-sync enabled to keep the card from overworking.
 
Thanks for you help on this, over the weekend I've been implementing various ideas including the suggestions on here. I think I've managed to get the temperature to a more sensible level and I thought I'd just outline what steps I took in case it helps anyone else.

Setting the a maximum fps seemed to improve things considerably and turning up the graphics quality. After turning Sniper Elite up to Ultra and limiting the fps to 70 the temperature kept at about 75 to 80. Seems with the graphics set on medium it was going at about 150fps and was the main culprit for the high temperatures.

I also removed CCC to make sure MSI afterburner was the only program in control of the fan speeds, I don't know if it's possible that CCC was overriding the settings I was making in afterburner? The case I'm using it the Bitfenix Prodigy M, so not the greatest in airflow, I added two 120mm fans to the top of the case to pull air in onto the GPU and a 200mm on the bottom as an exhaust. The CPU water cooler is also set to exhaust, not sure if this is optimal but seems to work.

Anyway thanks for everyone's help, glad to have the issue solved :)