XFX R9 290X Black OC Edition CrosFire Video Card Review @ [H]

DigitalGriffin said:
The 290 series supply is drying up. And the 390 series had some tweeks as well at 5GHz memory.

To quote the review, "the 390 is just a rebadge of the 290" is a bit misleading as there is twice the memory and a 25% boost in memory clock rate.

So HardOCP is reviewing a <mostly or soon to be> dead product. Then they implied the 390 won't do better.

Just a poor choice of reviews and wording.
Click to expand...

The only "tweak" is an overclocked core. 5ghz is normal memory speed for a 290X, The 390X is the same damned card and AMD is keeping it around a while so your conclusion is the only thing "dead" wrong. It seems like you may need to brush up on your understanding of the 290/390 tech specs.
 
Last edited:
Brent_Justice said:
We watch the GPU clocks live, while each game is running during overclocking, in this case it was not throttling. We even upped the fan speeds, as noted in the review, to alleviate any throttling due to thermals.

To any other questions r.e. the overclock, I'm going to investigate CF overclocking with these two cards on my system as well, and contact AMD and XFX to get to the bottom of it. Eventually we will be doing 390X CrossFire OC testing, and we will probably use these cards as a comparison, so I will test them and see if anything can be done, if not, we have two other XFX DD cards, non black edition, I will also attempt to overclock in CrossFire and see what happens.
Click to expand...

Interested in hearing the answer as to what is causing this. Really odd. Regardless thanks for the review.
 
Brent_Justice said:
We watch the GPU clocks live, while each game is running during overclocking, in this case it was not throttling. We even upped the fan speeds, as noted in the review, to alleviate any throttling due to thermals.

To any other questions r.e. the overclock, I'm going to investigate CF overclocking with these two cards on my system as well, and contact AMD and XFX to get to the bottom of it. Eventually we will be doing 390X CrossFire OC testing, and we will probably use these cards as a comparison, so I will test them and see if anything can be done, if not, we have two other XFX DD cards, non black edition, I will also attempt to overclock in CrossFire and see what happens.
Click to expand...
Thanks Brent. I'm curious to find out the cause. I didn't have the same problems with my 290X CF setup so very strange.
 
rennyf77 said:
when was the last time this site published an article of 290x cf at 4k? from what i can tell, it hasn't been since the gtx 970 4k review 7 months ago. How can you even compare the two sets of results when the author, test systems, and driver versions are different? there are only two games that are used in both articles. where's all the evidence to suggest that [H] fudged the results?
Click to expand...

I dont think I ever suggested [H] fudged anything. I was pointing to the previous review as possible evidence that maybe one of the 290x's was faulty or something. Its only one newer version of drivers as 14.12 has been around 7+ months now but yet we're seeing a pretty sizable swing in performance here. Youve got a pair of 290x's handily beating a pair of GTX970's then in a second review a few months later, youve got those 290x's being embarrassed by nearly 50% at one point.

Let me say it again, I would never believe or accuse [H] of anything shady and Im not fanboy'ing. Im just saying that there does seem to be a fault somewhere as the results from this review dont seem to jibe with previous results.

Brent has stated that he's going to look into the weirdness with the Crossfire setup and I have no doubt he'll figure it out.
 
strange performance you get from the 290x in crossfire.

Most 290x crossfire setups beat 970's in sli, same with the 295x2 (same thing pretty much) Strange results from HardOcp, hope they can figure out what caused it.
 
Thanks for the review guys.

290x's in X-Fire if you can get good 2nd hand cards for cheap is a great way to have some serious horse power.

I personally do not like the driver situation with AMD

I now use 2 x MSI 970's that HardOCP gave the gold review to and I love 'em. They are very powerful and stomp a Titans Z, Fury X or 980 ti pretty good.
 
MacLeod said:
I dont think I ever suggested [H] fudged anything. I was pointing to the previous review as possible evidence that maybe one of the 290x's was faulty or something. Its only one newer version of drivers as 14.12 has been around 7+ months now but yet we're seeing a pretty sizable swing in performance here. Youve got a pair of 290x's handily beating a pair of GTX970's then in a second review a few months later, youve got those 290x's being embarrassed by nearly 50% at one point.

Let me say it again, I would never believe or accuse [H] of anything shady and Im not fanboy'ing. Im just saying that there does seem to be a fault somewhere as the results from this review dont seem to jibe with previous results.

Brent has stated that he's going to look into the weirdness with the Crossfire setup and I have no doubt he'll figure it out.
Click to expand...

grady mckinney pretty clearly acknowledged that there is weirdness going on with this setup. he also stated that both cards were able to overclock individually past 1100mhz and both cards individually exhibited performance increases at the higher clocks. this currently unexplainable weirdness in and of itself deserves to be talked about regardless of what the 4k cf results were from 7 months ago.

only two games are the same in both tests. crysis 3 and bf4. on nov 17 the cf set up is 1 frame faster min, 9 frames faster max, and 5 frames faster average in crysis 3. in the new article the sli setup is 6 frames faster min, 1 frame faster max, and 3 frames faster average. the api used in the bf4 tests aren't the same between both articles and even then, the cf setup comes out slightly ahead; by 3 frames on nov 19 and by 7 frames in the new article. these are results that hardly show any one platform savaging the other. the games where cf exhibited a significant advantage 7 months ago aren't used any more, and the games now that show sli significantly ahead are titles we knew amd has trouble with anyway. so to use this supposed performance about-face as a justification for killing the article is as red herring as they get.

the results from 7 months ago absolutely should not be used as any kind of justification for keeping readers in the dark about the overclocking anomaly grady experienced with these black edition cards. i don't know if its your intention but that's what i'm hearing from you. that you agree with cyrio and apexitt that this article should not have seen the light of day.

to me what we're seeing has all the trappings of some kind of amd driver bug and not any kind of deliberate tomfoolery.
 
@rennyf77

If this were a driver bug, deliberate or accidental on AMD's behalf, then if I understand you right you're saying this bug has manifested itself in drivers released in the last 6 months. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that others with 290x CF set ups have downloaded the same 'bugged' driver. And would therefore be reporting the same curious behaviour. Such reports are conspicuous by their absence.
 
rennyf77 said:
grady mckinney pretty clearly acknowledged that there is weirdness going on with this setup. he also stated that both cards were able to overclock individually past 1100mhz and both cards individually exhibited performance increases at the higher clocks. this currently unexplainable weirdness in and of itself deserves to be talked about regardless of what the 4k cf results were from 7 months ago.

only two games are the same in both tests. crysis 3 and bf4. on nov 17 the cf set up is 1 frame faster min, 9 frames faster max, and 5 frames faster average in crysis 3. in the new article the sli setup is 6 frames faster min, 1 frame faster max, and 3 frames faster average. the api used in the bf4 tests aren't the same between both articles and even then, the cf setup comes out slightly ahead; by 3 frames on nov 19 and by 7 frames in the new article. these are results that hardly show any one platform savaging the other. the games where cf exhibited a significant advantage 7 months ago aren't used any more, and the games now that show sli significantly ahead are titles we knew amd has trouble with anyway. so to use this supposed performance about-face as a justification for killing the article is as red herring as they get.

the results from 7 months ago absolutely should not be used as any kind of justification for keeping readers in the dark about the overclocking anomaly grady experienced with these black edition cards. i don't know if its your intention but that's what i'm hearing from you. that you agree with cyrio and apexitt that this article should not have seen the light of day.

to me what we're seeing has all the trappings of some kind of amd driver bug and not any kind of deliberate tomfoolery.
Click to expand...

Ok how about this. I have had AMD for the past 5 years and not one driver issue. But in the past month I was having some IE issue loading random pages, as in wont load, hangs, and an issue where if there was a video ad on the side of a particular page the page would automatically scroll back to the ad and would not let me scroll past it for 3-5 sec. Now at first I thought maybe it was an AMD driver issue because it was after I dl 15.5 for TW3. I turned backed to 14.12 and it seemed fixed for the web pages at least. So I could have written up a review at this point saying it was an AMD driver issue but... . Seems a few days later the issue with the ads came back and a few days later (2 days ago) I was having issue loading some pages, this REVIEW in particular. So I started changing drivers again and it persisted. Now this whole time what I didn't mention is since I was not inclined to believe it was an AMD driver issue, I suspected it was an ADOBE FLASH issue, I hate Adobe and iTunes, they are so much like viruses and require updates every three days it seems (no longer have iTunes).

But 2 days ago Adobe had an update and BAMMM it was fixed. Moral of the story is sometimes it is best to wait to report an issue to the world till you have a better understanding of what the issue is.
 
fingerbob69 said:
@rennyf77

If this were a driver bug, deliberate or accidental on AMD's behalf, then if I understand you right you're saying this bug has manifested itself in drivers released in the last 6 months. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that others with 290x CF set ups have downloaded the same 'bugged' driver. And would therefore be reporting the same curious behaviour. Such reports are conspicuous by their absence.
Click to expand...

i agree with your reasoning, but on the 8th post cage himself acknowledged experiencing the same overclocking anomaly that grady reported, though with a single card setup. not exactly the same but similar. truthfully it would be impossible for us to say that absolutely no one else is experiencing this phenomenon. there could be other users out there like cageymaru who don't mention it at all until its referenced on a medium like hardocp or whatever other misgivings they may hold.

this is the reason i don't use driver weirdness as an excuse to recommend or not recommend a particular brand of hardware. even during those controversies i mentioned on post 39, i didn't stop buying amd hardware nor did i dissuade my users from buying amd hardware. if a product exhibits a lot of performance for the dollar or has a great pack-in promotion like 'never settle' its easy for me to overlook driver weirdness because i know it will eventually get fixed.
 
If you know [H] enough, you know they will follow up. But the results on the cards, non-OC'ed, don't seem too far off what would be expected to say it's a completely broken card or cards.

But to say they shouldn't have done the review at all, these are two out of the box 290x's which a reader might get today, if not for knowing there is potentially an issue in Xfire right now, which may be fixed and I'm sure [H] will update if so. But right now, should [H] just shut up and let people buy what may be a worse value for their money at this point in time?
 
Well I figured out part of my problem. I have a Razer BlackWidow keyboard. The Razer software completely fucks with my OC. I have to manually disable as many parts of it before I can OC my video card. I ran 3DMark and these were my results. I want to add that I exited Raptr also even though I do not have it set to record footage automatically.

Razer software running 1050 Core 1350 mem. 8805 Graphics score.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5134392

Disabled as many obvious Razer software things in Task Manager as possible, exited Raptr, and got this score.

1060 core 1350 mem 11,648 graphics score.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5291654

SoundBlaster Zx stopped crashing completely and now has a 15 second pause before I can access the control panel menu after switching from Headphone to Speaker and vice versa. Before it would completely lock up the SoundBlaster control panel and I would have to restart it and everything that used sound on my PC.

So now I'm looking for a keyboard that doesn't require software running in the background 24/7. :) Hope this helps some random soul on the internet with this issue and happens to Google this thread.

Also want to add that I don't normally disable things to benchmark. So Steam, GOG, Origin, Malwarebytes, Windows Defender, Google Chrome, Skype, Office, etc are all running
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Well damn, on top of crashing DAI the razor crapware also messes with OC? It's coming off my secondary rig.

Thanks
 
You don't have to have Synapse running in the background for the keyboard.
 
Yakk said:
Well damn, on top of crashing DAI the razor crapware also messes with OC? It's coming off my secondary rig.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Just noticed that my little R9 290 scored almost as high as a stock 970 in the Oculus recommended graph with my wimpy OC. Not bad. Not bad at all. ;)
 
Ah yes you'll need the software for the macros but I never use mine aside from making the bottom one a mute key. That's still weird tho. I've got a 290x and run Synapse 24/7 and have never had a problem with it interfering with anything.
 
MacLeod said:
Ah yes you'll need the software for the macros but I never use mine aside from making the bottom one a mute key. That's still weird tho. I've got a 290x and run Synapse 24/7 and have never had a problem with it interfering with anything.
Click to expand...

I didn't have issues with Synapse before I reinstalled Win 8.1 Pro because my Seagate 3TB HD died. It was my Steam drive and I got sick of removing dead links in Add / Remove Programs. So I bought an OCZ 256GB SSD and couple of older model Hitachi 2TB HD's to toy with Raid 0 to replace the 3TB Seagate for science. :) The Razer software is installed on the SSD.

I have reinstalled this thing at least 3 times to try and figure out what was wrong. My old install as far as I know didn't have this issue. I could fire it up and see. You know. For science. :)

Wonder if it will freak out that F: Drive is now a Raid?
 
Last edited:
Ran 1060 core 1350 mem on my old Win 8.1 install with Razer Synapse running. 11,673 graphics score. Windows was trying to do some updates but I just ran it anyways.
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7608832?

The first thing that popped up after loading Windows was that there is an update for Razer Synapse available. I didn't install it. So maybe this new update is the issue? I ordered my Hitachi drives on 5/31/2015. So this update went out after that date.

Back to my new install. Windows Defender wants to scan my system since it hasn't run for a month on my old install. Got no time for that!

Edit. SoundBlaster Zx works perfectly fine also. Absolutely seamless. On my new install it is fucked to hell when Synapse is running.

Installing Windows 8.1 updates to see if one could be the culprit.

Installed 38 updates and same graphics score. 11,712.
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7609374?

Installed CAT 15.6 and left Raptr running + older Synapse running. Same scores again. 11.733.
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7609769?

Mom wants dinner and gave me a hug for me to hurry up. End of testing for now. ;) Thinking of just installing Win 10 preview this evening.
 
Last edited:
Cryio said:
I had to log-in just to comment on this review.

Once you saw something was seriously off with the OC results, you should've canceled this review or search for issue why this happens.

290X in Crossfire at 4K are as fast or faster usually than SLI 980s. There is no way in hell Xfire of 290Xs is some 15-20% slower than SLI 970s.

OC'd 290Xs in 4K should be able wipe the floor with 970s, no questions asked.


PS: In Witcher 3, Crossfire, enabling AA currently breaks Crossfire. It's in the driver release notes. Disable AA to proper compare.
Click to expand...

There are just too many games in general that crossfire gets broken with. It's like a gentle sweet soft little teddy bear that gets ripped in half at every moment's notice. This isn't just AMD camp either.. Nvidia has its own issues with SLI from time to time.

There should really be some kind of hardware based solution or hardware level / based processing for the tech. Even after all these years I have just grown totally annoyed and disillusioned with the tech. I don't have time or patience to dig up research for each individual title to find that 60% of them do not work correctly with a second large dollar investment.

I will be staying single card for a long, long time. Installing different driver sets to work with one game and not another is not appealing. I'm done.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top