Crossfire R9 290s have a high idle power consumption

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allen5055

[H]ard|Gawd
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Mar 25, 2012
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Hi, I have four R9 290s in my rig, only two of which are turned on. When I turn on my 2nd R9 290, the idle power even when it's not being used is quite high. I am pulling 239W at the wall now with two R9 290's on, and only 150W at idle when I have only one R9 290 enabled. When the computer is booting power draw is the same as when it's fully on and at idle. The second card is never going into ULPS.

I have two R9 290s disabled through a switch on my motherboard that turns off that PCIe slot. When they are off, they have not affected my power draw. It's only when they're on that each one seems to add 70W idle power draw.

I have the newest AMD Catalyst drivers installed. Crossfire is enabled. I'm using MSI afterburner. I have NOT disabled ULPS. Regedit shows that EnableULPS is set to 1. Unofficial overclocking mode is not enabled. Afterburner says that both GPUS are at 300mhz core clock and are idling at 37C (it's a hot day). Out of my four GPUS, the two that are enabled are number 1 and 2 according to my PCIe selector switch.

I'm wondering if theres some setting that I have wrong. I figured ULPS should make the secondary card idle almost at 0W, certainly not 70W. If I can figure out how to lower the idle power draw I'll turn on all four GPUs.

My rig:
i7 4770k
32GB G.Skill Ripjaw 2400mhz RAM
Gigabyte Z87 OC Force
4x XFX R9 290s
Lepa G 1600W PSU
500GB Samsung 840 EVO
3TB internal western digital HD
Watercooled setup. Dual D5 pumps, 2x480mm 60mm alphacool radiators, 1x240mm XPSC radiator
 
Last edited:
I managed to improve my power draw somewhat. Instead of #1 and 2 GPUs, I enabled #1 and 3. Power draw dropped from 250W at idle to 210W.
 
Swap the cards in slots 1 and 2 or 2 and 3.

See if that makes a difference.
 
Only way you are going to troubleshoot the issue is to swap cards around.

I am guessing that you have a faulty card.
 
Yeah the waterloop is fixed. All four cards are in the loop. Two are disabled. My idle power consumption is much more acceptable now that I have cards 1+3 enabled. My guess is that this has to do with the chip splitting PCI-express lanes on my motherboard. Due to this motherboard having 4 SLI 8x slots, it has a special chip creating more PCI-express lanes.
 
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