Ah nuts, the crossfire of my XFX R9 290x and the Gigabyte R9 290 I just bought used works great. (No problems, just plug and play.) The noise does not bother me even though they are reference coolers. (Wanted the heat shoved out of the case and not blown around in it.) The thing I had not counted on is that my APC Back-UPS XS 1000 is unable to handle them. At full load, it is causing an overload condition on the UPS. Now I have to decide if I want to buy a bigger UPS, move the computer off of the battery backup section or just return the Gigabyte card I just bought. (Bought it through an Amazon Fulfilled vendor just in case.) The Gigabyte card is not unlockable either and I have no overclocked the cards. Maybe I could just run my cpu at stock clocks.
Hmm that is a an odd issue that cards are overloading a UPS on full load. Like what does the UPS do when it is overloaded? What else to you have connected to your UPS besides your computer?
I would not run that cpu at stock, as is it is a pretty big bottleneck with that cpu with that much gpu power.
only things I think you could do, is either buy a UPS that can take the load (bet that wont be cheap) or stop using the UPS you have. quote "(Wanted the heat shoved out of the case and not blown around in it.)" I thought the same thing until : the cards get so hot anyway (the outer casing) even though the blower is pushing the air out the case the cards now x2 outer casing will still heat the inside of your case, as for blowing around the case every PC should have an case exhaust to cope with this anyway. I had 2 r9 290x's they would heat my whole room up when at full load lol also as loud as an vacuum cleaner, that I certainly wont miss... this is how I had to deal with the case heating .. in the end I had to stop using the Blaster Z sound card in the system because if you look at the lower r9 290x you can clearly see the heat sink inside the blower is directly above the sound card so would over heat it, that's how much heat radiates off the casing .. and that was with all the case fans flat out too. http://www.hardwareheaven.com/community/threads/zalman-zm-mfc-3.227997/
Well, I do love having 2 x 290's. However, even though I do not mind the fan noise since I have a Fractal Design R3 case, the overload issue with my UPS means I am probably just going to return this Gigabyte card instead. My machine runs fast as it is and with Mantle support, I end up with even faster performance. (With games that support it of course.) I just do not find myself wanting to buy a larger UPS and I prefer to leave my computer on the battery part just in case. (Power outages or fluctuations are not good.) Although, my Smart M850 power supply has no issues running the 2 cards itself.
stevenicks, I found with further testing that the cards as a pair get to hot for my case to handle them. (Even the side got very, very warm.) With one card, the fan is not noisy at all and the case does not heat up all that much. Oh well, the card is going back and I really did want these 2 cards to work together. (Also, BF4 was hitching in crossfire with Mantle but worked great and smooth with one card, go figure.)
