Question 1

About how big of a power supply will i need if i want to crossfire two of these cards? i have a 750 Watt running one right now

Accepted Answer

I have two of these running on a system with a 750W Gold rated power supply. They are pulling 705W at the wall, so that is well within the budget of the power supply.  If your power supply is silver rated or higher you should be OK, otherwise upgrade to 800 or 850.

Question 2

Will this card support 3 monitors?

Accepted Answer

Yes but if using more than one display port only use active adapters, available on the new egg site

Question 3

How many watts does this card need to operate or what is the recommended power supply wattage?

Accepted Answer

Based on readings from a kill-a-watt, mine tops out at 350watts all in, full over clock. I would not attempt to run this card with less than a 600watt power supply, unless you are certain of what your system itself is drawing.

Question 4

What is the exact length of this card? It's not in the specifications which I find odd.

Accepted Answer

It's a full 12 inches (30.5cm). Only one case I own can fit this behemoth, so make sure the case you plan to use has the clearance.

Question 5

Would i be able to get away with using this card with a 725W psu?

Accepted Answer

Probably... I put a Corsair RM850 high efficiency PSU (~ 90% effincey at 50% load or 424 watts) in my system, along with an ASUS Z87 Deluxe Mother board (100watts under load) and a i7-4770K CPU (104 watts under load), a 1 TB SSD (1.35 watts ;-) couple of Blu-Ray drive/burners (25watts x 2), 3TB hard drive (10 watts... and a few other do-dads... it all adds up pretty fast. The Sapphire Tri-X R9 290 draws just 75 watts idle, but once you "engage" it in a rich game... it'll pull 350-375watts all by itself. So... you need to look at your whole system and decide if your 725W PSU will keep the lights on. Remember, if your PSU is typical, it will only convert 75-77% of the power it draws from your wall into power for your components. Your computer actually has a maximum available power of 550 watts. Minus your Graphics card's 350w and you're left with just 200w for your mother board, hard drives, DVD Drives, RAM, and USB devices that suck power from your mother board's ports, fans, (6 watts each) and "do-dads"... Suddenly your PSU is running full on to deliver just enough or maybe not enough power to your system.

So... I would say, maybe, but you should do an inventory of your power needs, then decide where you are comfortable.

I choose a large and high efficient PSU so that my machine would be super quiet (fans in the PSU don't even turn on most the time), generate less heat (only 10% of it's power draw gets turned in to waste heat) and so that it would be running in it's "sweet spot" of providing all needed power without breaking a sweat and thus taxing it's life span. Not to mention better PSUs condition and provide cleaner more stable power to my expensive graphics card! ;-)

Good Luck!

Question 6

I have a 650w Bronze PSU.  Will it be able to power this card?  Or would I need to upgrade the power supply?

Accepted Answer

A quality name brand 650W 80 Plus Bronze certified PSU is more than enough for this card. While I have a Corsair HX850 in my system, a friend is running this same card in his system on a Corsair HX650, an overclocked FX-8350, 5 case fans, 1 SSD, and 7 HDD's. He has all of the SATA channels on his board saturated. So you should be fine. =]

Question 7

Would it be recommended for me to upgrade to this card (or add into crossfire/SLI) over my current Asus Matrix Platinum 5870 2Gb 256-bit GDDR5? Would I want to upgrade anything else given my current build?

1. ASUS P6X58D Premium LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
2. Intel Core i7-930 Bloomfield 2.8GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Desktop Processor 
3. 12GB SDRAM DDR3 1600
4. CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-850TX 850W Power Supply

I built this system a few years back with no additional upgrades. Thanks for the feedback!

Accepted Answer

I do not think you would have any bottlenecks in your system if you were to upgrade to this card. Your psu will handle it fine and 930s over clocked pretty well. Now if you're looking to get two of these then in my honest opinion, unless you're going to mine cryptocurrencies with them, then I would actually go Nvidia instead. I have 6 of these cards on sandy bridge platforms for mining. However, I game on my main rig still and have been able to test their capabilities. I have found AMD drivers and crossfire to extremely buggy and not smooth. Titan fall has artifacts in crossfire and stutters in ACIV where it does not with CF disabled. I came from two EVA 680FTW+ cards in SLI that were bios molded to 770s and I'm wishing that I'd never sold those. I never had any issues with those cards in SLI and Nvidia was always great about kicking out an updated driver after a game came out. Titan fall played smoother on my 680 than on my 290. And that irritates me to no end.

Anyways, I hope that helps. I hate to sound biased but jeeze, I've never has so many issues with a gpu than I have when switching to AMD.

Question 8

Would this GPU Fit this case - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811124150 If not, is there any good cards for equal price that would fit?

Accepted Answer

no, it will not fit the case the card is really large. I could not get it in a Antec 900 without altering things. I currently run that card in a full case the Antec 1200. there are a lot of good cards out there it just depends on what you want it for. run all the time, gaming, video, ect .... In my mid case(Antec 900) I use a R9 270x. This card is not only to long but the space it takes up on the board is a lot so you have to think about the board you got running cables and things. It will use 2 slots and cover one up so that all has to be considered i think.

Question 9

What are the physical dimensions of the card? Was it easy to fit into a full ATX?

Accepted Answer

It depends on the case.  In my full ATX CoolerMaster Storm Scout it would not have fit by about an inch and a half.  Thankfully I did my research and settled on a new build around a Bitfenix Prodigy which, with the middle drive bay removed, fits the card wonderfully (and the side vents being right over the card's fans help temperatures too!)

Do your research on your new or existing case before ordering this card!

Question 10

I use a ASUS Sabertooth series motherboard (apologies, deployed and don't remember the specific model) and I've got it spaciously packed inside a CoolerMaster HAF full-size case.  Should I expect any issues with size or compatibility?  I'm not worried about the power supply (1000W/Gold rated).

Accepted Answer

Size and compatibility are not an issue.

I have this card running on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 board in a Cooler Master HAF 932, and there is still about an inch of clearance between the cards extended cooler and the front HDD trays, so plenty of room.

1000W is also way more than enough power, you could easily run 2 of these in Crossfire with a lot of headroom on a 1000W PSU.

Hope that helps.

Questions & Answers