4 Weeks with Radeon R9 290X CrossFire @ [H]

hey kyle , its a good thing you got that case. your rear exhaust literally hits a wall :cool:

ever thought of making a ghetto mod and running a duct to exhaust the hot air from your case? (you know those dryer flexible ducts) :D
 
My 3 290's are running 6060X1080 with no major problems with great settings on modern games. (cooling is abit of an issue as I mentioned earlier, but I only spent 1260 bucks on 3 cards.)

I can run some bench's and frame rate comparisons with 2 vs 3 if you like. However you do have more pixels then me so its not 100% even comparison.
 
$1400 to watercool? Wtf?
For the entire machine, multiple GPUs, yeah, it can get very expensive especially if you do all the fancy fittings and hoses. Full cover blocks for a GPU are $120+, plus the CPU block, plus multiple radiators, reservoirs, pumps, etc.
 
$1400 to watercool? Wtf?


I was surprised myself.

CPU block, Bridge /mainboard power block, Ram blocks, 3 GPU blocks, high grade pump, reservoir, connectors to every block, piping, large radiator, 9 fans, fluid and spare fluid, compound, yea it all adds up pretty fast. I was thinking maybe 700 and found out quick that wasn't realistic. If you add a Recirculating Liquid Chiller its another 1400 bucks.
 
$1400 to watercool? Wtf?

Watercooling isn't cheap if you want to do a good custom setup. I was able to get mine down to $1000 before with a lot of discounts, but that was pretty cheap. That is also with skipping some nice extras like quick disconnects. My setup had 2 loops, 2 full GPU blocks, 1 CPU block, LC Memory, Northbridge, 2 pumps, 2 360 radiators, high flow tubes and connectors, 2 reservoirs, fluid, etc.
 
I was surprised myself.

CPU block, Bridge /mainboard power block, Ram blocks, 3 GPU blocks, high grade pump, reservoir, connectors to every block, piping, large radiator, 9 fans, fluid and spare fluid, compound, yea it all adds up pretty fast. I was thinking maybe 700 and found out quick that wasn't realistic. If you add a Recirculating Liquid Chiller its another 1400 bucks.

RAM blocks are pretty pointless, only useful for looks. Fluid, use distilled water, it's like a couple bucks for a gallon. With compound I assume you mean TIM, just get Arctic Silver or something, they have those huge tubes that are like $20 and will last you years.

But I guess I wasn't thinking about the entire PC. I thought it was just CPU and GPU.
 
I've spent around 600$ on my water cooling setup.

I have two radiators(240 and 280), single d5 pump/res , cpu block, Gpu block.

The R9 290/290x are monsters under water.

my 290 (unlocked to 290x) is at 1200 core/1500 memory runs at 40c full load.

replaced my 7950 crossfire with this card. I didn't then the 290 was loud with its factory fan. Its gets a noisy above 60% fan speed though.
 
I was looking at just under 1200 for CPU+3GPU's without getting super fancy.
 
Nice article? I want my 7 minutes back. I guess I should have stopped after reading the intro.
 
YES!!!!!!

I am so happy to read your review.....

I have been in dilemna for weeks now!!!!!!

I am planning z87 sniper 5 rig with 4770k. Planning to crossfire 290's... and wow, I have same RV 03 case......

Now I will pull trigger on 290's

I am jumping now... and I am so happy reading your review.
 
hey all,

I sort of had the opposite experience with R9 290s crossfire. I pulled the trigger on R9 290s after being a long time Nvidia (many gens) SLI user. But i really liked the value the R9 290s brought to the table. So i had these cards for about a month and in some games they ran great, loved them. but then i was finding that in some of the other games i had that worked flawlessly with SLI, either was not nearly as smooth as Nvidia or simply did not support crossfire and i had to disable it. Some of these games were, Saints Row 3 and 4, Batman, AC3, AC4,COD Ghosts, even in Far Cry 3 i found that it was just not as smooth as SLI. In addition i was getting the odd texture flickering in BF4 which is completely gone with the 780ti's. As i have not had any experience with AMD before i am not sure how much frame pacing improved things, but over all i just found that more often then not Multi-gpu support was not at the same level as it was with Nvidia.
However there were a couple games, BF4 and Crysis 3 which ran like a dream and you could really tell AMD drivers were optimized.

So i was kind of bummed out that I was having more issues with games then i did with my Nvidia SLI set up , but the happy ending for me to all this is I took advantage of this Litecoin craze and was able to sell my cards for $100 more then i paid !!, In one day on Kijiji.

So last night i ended up picking up 2 780Ti's. Re-installed Windows and have been gaming all day, All the games were running smooth again with all supported multi-gpu.

Just if you were wondering i have a 3930K @ 4.6 gaming at 2560x1600.

So yeah, i am not a fan boy of either and went over to AMD with an open mind but my personnel experience , overall, was just not as polished as it was with Nividia.

I will say though, i do miss the 290s in BF4, as the 4GB VRAM allowed me to run on ultra with the resolution slider at 150%, with the 3GB on the 780ti's i can only run the res slider at 125% as it maxes out my VRAM at 3GB.

And the heat and noise, the noise of the 290s never bothered me, i even set the fan profile a bit past stock levels to keep from throttling. But now that i hae the 780Ti's there is a big noticable difference. Even with the 780Ti's OCd to 1200mhz boost and the fan set at 70%, it is much quieter and temps max at 70C vise 94C. But like i said, that in no way bugged me when i had the 290s.

Just thought i would share my experience from a difference perspective.

cheers
 
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Nice article? I want my 7 minutes back. I guess I should have stopped after reading the intro.


That's why we do not charge a subscription, this way we don't have to worry about all the refunds.
 
GOOD SIR! Tidy up that case and do some cable management stat. ;)

I kid, I kid.
 
nod nod :)
lol only so much you can do with non-modular PSU's. I tied off everything I could and ran as much through the back casing as possible. I suppose I could "cut" psu cables, but I'm just not as daring as some of our moders.

all in good fun :)
 
You know it does feel odd to see my pc and not see a SLI bridge. I had Nvidia cards since the Hercules DDR-DVI Geforce 1. This is quite a jump for me going Red :)
 
Door stops. ;) Those will likely go into another system here in the house with a single display setup. Being kids of a hardware guy has its perks.

Help a po gamer out, share the silicon :)

(all my $ has gone into house renovations...)
 
Kyle, I know you feel this setup is significantly better than your Titan SLI setup, so I am curious, for the average Titan SLI user, would you say it would be worth the upgrade to 290x CF? I have the Titan SLI setup right now, and I also have issues with playing games in surround, considering I am playing at 7680x1440. Given your personal experience with your surround setup, do you think those 290X's could handle up to 7680x1440 at an appreciable difference (and subjective opinions are welcome)?

That is significantly more pixels than I was gaming with. For some insight I would take a look at our 4K numbers. But that resolution is still about 30% more that 4K even.

http://hardocp.com/article/2013/11/11/geforce_gtx_780_ti_vs_radeon_r9_290x_4k_gaming/
 
By far not as impressive as the custom box's around, but it is quick.

The poor cards in that box are suffocating. I would suggest you would have GPU heat issues with the door off much less on.
 
That is the beast of triple or quad video card machines. They are so close they do suffocate. Thus higher fan speeds and more sound. Most defiantly. But you either deal with it or you pay for the water cooling setup. This is the 1st time Ive had less then 4 cards in my machine in years. Feels spacious lol.
 
Anyway, i'm sorry to bring your x58 issues up. But I feel that you just don't deal with stuff like that to nearly the same extent on the green side. They (nvidia) just work much more diligently on giving the user a good experience, and I find that well worth the premium to buy the GTX 780 over a 290, for example.

You mean like when the 8800gt was released and some people found out that the PCIe 1.0 slot on their MB wouldn't work with it(even for single cards). The VIA chipset used on those boards was the problem because it didn't follow PCIe specs so it wasn't forward compatible with PCIe 2.0, some manufacturers updated the BIOS while others didn't and people got stuck with cards they couldn't use without replacing their MB(sound familiar?).

Your recent posts have been rather comical with all of the half truths and exaggerations but I don't understand why you care so much about this that you have allowed yourself to get bent out of shape about it.
 
That is the beast of triple or quad video card machines. They are so close they do suffocate. Thus higher fan speeds and more sound. Most defiantly. But you either deal with it or you pay for the water cooling setup. This is the 1st time Ive had less then 4 cards in my machine in years. Feels spacious lol.

Well it is hard for me to watch you criticize the cards on temperature when you are blocking off the intake fans that are used to cool those. That is kinds like saying you got a really shitty quality snorkel and you stuffed the end of it full of chewing gum before you used it.
 
(I am still waiting to replace these with a single 45" 4K display that caters to gaming and high refresh rates.)
Me too. However, I'm pretty sure that is just a pipe dream—for the foreseeable future anyway.
 
Nice write up. I always like "real world" articles like that based on actually using the parts in your own rig. Youll generally get some insight that doesnt always come thru in reviews. Noise for instance isnt might not be as big a problem when youre really into a game and not paying attention as opposed to sitting there staring at an SPL meter.

But I gotta ask one question? Why do you need 7 hard drives? :D
 
I doubt that it (290X) is louder than my Gigabyte 7990, but I will wait for the custom cooling then the 7970 in my target machine will go with another 7970 in a different machine. It just doesn't seem to me the straight 290 is a good enough value. You get a lot more for just a little more with the 290X.

I'd buy a Matrox before an Nvidia card.
 
You mean like when the 8800gt was released and some people found out that the PCIe 1.0 slot on their MB wouldn't work with it(even for single cards). The VIA chipset used on those boards was the problem because it didn't follow PCIe specs so it wasn't forward compatible with PCIe 2.0, some manufacturers updated the BIOS while others didn't and people got stuck with cards they couldn't use without replacing their MB(sound familiar?).

Your recent posts have been rather comical with all of the half truths and exaggerations but I don't understand why you care so much about this that you have allowed yourself to get bent out of shape about it.


I was one of the first to get my Evga 8800GT SC and I know what your talking about as I ended up having to overclock my pci express to 101Mhz to get the card running right and Evga give me a Blue Ribbon because I got it working lol..

Still loving my 290 and thanks for the great write up to put an end to the flying BS..
 
This article is not meant to come off as "technical review." While there are some data points referenced, the body of this article is totally subjective. If we were sitting down having a few beers talking GPU tech, these are the things I would tell you...likely with more cursing though.

Thanks for doing this....nice to read a 'thoughts on [strike=]paper[/s] screen' article as a break from all the reviews/news that everyone else does. Articles like this is why I love [H].
 
Hey you take the Matrox comment back!

There was a brief battle after the top-of-the-line Matrox Millennium (I had it in PCI with a Daughter card that boosted the onboard memory) for AGP winners and Matrox dropped by the wayside. I had a couple of other oddballs too.

Makes me really appreciate the new cards like the 290X.
 
There is no way thats possible Kyle!!!! You must be bought out from AMD (kidding of course).

It really is nice to see someones honest opinion about how they run.

The funniest thing in this thread, is the guy who posted the pic of his tri-fire case and complaining about it overheating....Really dood? Just 1 glance at that case and I can EASILY tell you why you are having issues.

Some people I tell ya.

Either way I r jealous Kyle!
 
I understand your comment and I agree fully that setups such as mine with defiantly run hotter, however. AMD knows that triple and quad-fire systems will be sandwiched together due to space limitations. Maxing the fan speed of the cards at 47% was idiotic. They were just trying to hide how loud the cards could get. They could of handled the sandwiching stock had they not had these self imposed limitations.

Please explain how having basically no space for your video cards to breathe is AMD's fault, I need a good laugh after tonight.
 
I was surprised myself.

CPU block, Bridge /mainboard power block, Ram blocks, 3 GPU blocks, high grade pump, reservoir, connectors to every block, piping, large radiator, 9 fans, fluid and spare fluid, compound, yea it all adds up pretty fast. I was thinking maybe 700 and found out quick that wasn't realistic. If you add a Recirculating Liquid Chiller its another 1400 bucks.

You don't need half of that stuff. Ram blocks, VRM/southbridge motherboard blocks are completely pointless other then looks for this generation and just add restriction to a loop.
 
Kyle, I know you feel this setup is significantly better than your Titan SLI setup, so I am curious, for the average Titan SLI user, would you say it would be worth the upgrade to 290x CF? I have the Titan SLI setup right now, and I also have issues with playing games in surround, considering I am playing at 7680x1440. Given your personal experience with your surround setup, do you think those 290X's could handle up to 7680x1440 at an appreciable difference (and subjective opinions are welcome)?

I'm running at 7680x1600. Take it from me, you need three cards at the very least.
 
Well sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet...

I've got two 780Ti cards coming today...reading this kinda makes me think I should have just gone for the reference 290X cards.

Ah well, live and learn, I will hang on to the 780Ti cards for a while, I am sure they will be just fine for a good while to come.

Good write-up by the way. I don't get the few negative comments, if you don't like "living with articles" then a) you don't have to click the link b) you know where the door is.
 
Well sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet...

I've got two 780Ti cards coming today...reading this kinda makes me think I should have just gone for the reference 290X cards.

Ah well, live and learn, I will hang on to the 780Ti cards for a while, I am sure they will be just fine for a good while to come.

Good write-up by the way. I don't get the few negative comments, if you don't like "living with articles" then a) you don't have to click the link b) you know where the door is.

I really like "living with articles." The thing is, reviews don't paint the whole picture. They are the reviewers initial impressions and brief experiences. We rarely have a product for more than a week or two before writing about it. Sometimes we don't even get that much lead time. Articles which talk about the user experience over a period of time are harder to do simply because of how fast this technology becomes outdated. After six months or less in some cases, the product loses relevance. This article was about a two week long experience, but that's probably long enough to get tired of the noise, or run into more day to day problems. You know, the things you don't always catch in reviews.
 
On page 4 you mention that r9 290 is going for 500 that is 50 above msrp. This is incorrect.
Otherwise good article.

I can't tolerate 49 db so these cards are not for me... Yet!
 
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