XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition

There is a review of the XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation Edition posted at LanOC today that is definitely worth checking out. You can see our recent Crossfire evaluation here.

Out of last year’s AMD cards there was one card that stood above the rest with an all metal custom cooler. That was the double dissipation HD 7970 from XFX. This year there is a lot more competition and XFX has changed their design once again. I’m excited to find out how XFX stands up against the competition this year. With a black and chrome it certainly has the styling needed, but how is the performance?

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Mine showed up the other day and it seems pretty well built with one annoying exception. Its the first GPU I've encountered with screws on the back plate for the HDMI and heatsink that are not flat heads and not counter sunk to be flush on the expansion plate. They stick out so far I was not able to mount the card in my Lian Li A10B without either removing them or adding my own countersinks and swapping them for flat heads which is what I ended up doing. Before adding the countersinks and flat heads it would push against the chassis enough to wedge it on an angle where it wouldn't sit in the PCI-E slot properly and there was no way to screw it down into the chassis.

Here is a picture when I started disassembling it with circled screws and points where they were pushing against the back of the chassis. Not cool considering how little it would have cost XFX to make that flush like every other GPU I've owned in the last 10+ years.





On the upside it makes much less fan noise than my previous 7970 or 6970. Its even quieter than my (presumably dying) Apple Time Capsule that likes to keep its useless internal fan with no vent spinning at full speed.

Also to the XFX rep on the forums: Unless the email has changed since last time I contacted support at [email protected] there is something wonky with your email server. It just bounces everything with the message SMTP Relay Rejected. And to be nitpicky the promo redemption process for BF4 has 'please' abbreviated as 'pls' which seems a bit...unprofessional for a company support portal.