I've had the 290x for probably 2 years now and it always seemed to run a little hot. Sometimes it would get up to 90c (194F) in a program that would have the GPU using 100%. In an ordinary game with average GPU use I'd say it would be around 85C(185F) sometimes a bit lower. I'd read online several places that said it was common for the card to get up to 90C. Well today I decided to take it apart and wow the stock thermal paste was a mess! It looks like they had applied too much to it so it wasn't doing it's job properly. I cleaned it all off and put some Artic Silver 5 that I've had laying around for shit probably 10 years or more
I put it all back together and loaded up Furmark which is basically a GPU stress test. Usually if I ran it I'd have to stop after a few minutes because the temperature would get up to 90C or higher. With the new thermal paste it maxed out at 80C (176F) I let it run for a little bit after it got to 80C and it never went any higher.
Another thing I forgot to mention is when it would get around 90c the fan would be at almost 100 percent (through a custom fan profile) Now if I set the fan to 100 percent under 100 percent gpu load the temperature is 63C(145F) That is a drop of around 27C or 50F! I'm amazed!
I had a 290, and after a while I just stopped caring about temps. I let it go to whatever it wanted and manually kept the fan down so my computer wasn't loud.
Worked as a great heater in last years winter.
I just assume they can get to like 300 degrees and still be fine, because it's AMD lol
