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

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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4 Weeks with Radeon R9 290X CrossFire - What do you get when you take two AMD Radeon R9 290X video cards, configure those for CrossFire, and set those at your feet for four weeks? We give our thoughts and opinions about actually using these GPUs in our own system for four weeks with focus on sound profile and heat generated by these cards.
 
Thanks for sticking a link to my X58 thread in your article Kyle. I am excited to get these cards working. Please let me know when/if you hear anything back from AMD.
 
Thanks for the honest information. It has been pretty hard to find any since release. Also how do you have your Eyefinity configuration connected? I have the same displays. I was looking at getting a Displayport hub.
 
Thanks for the write-up.

I disagree about the sound. I found it to be so loud I had replace the heatsink.
Right now I'm praying that I can buy one with a custom heatsink as soon as they are available.
 
Did they fix Borderlands 2 where you couldn't use PhysX with an AMD card? I was able to use Medium while gaming with a 6970 with no issues and actually saw those affects.
 
What did you do with your Titans?
 
Right now I'm working in my office with both my 290Xs mining and the fans going at 65-70%. I guess I am just a masochist, but it really just sounds like white noise to me. It's not that unbearably loud. I'm just listening to some music and it mostly drowns it out.
 
Interesting article. Thank you for all the work you fellows do. [H]ard is always the first place I come to for no BS real talk about hardware and gaming.
 
BIGGRIMTIM said:
Also how do you have your Eyefinity configuration connected? I have the same displays. I was looking at getting a Displayport hub.
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I have two connected to DVI and one with DP.

gersson said:
I disagree about the sound. I found it to be so loud I had replace the heatsink.
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Article is totally subjective. :)

BHenry said:
Did they fix Borderlands 2 where you couldn't use PhysX with an AMD card? I was able to use Medium while gaming with a 6970 with no issues and actually saw those affects.
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Borderslands 2 has physics effects, and PhysX effects. AMD cards do not support the proprietary PhysX effects and never have to my knowledge.

leSLIe said:
What did you do with your Titans?
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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.
 
Well that depends don't it. I have 3 XFX R9 290's not even 290X.s in Tripple Crossfire on the X58 Asus Rampage Extreme III with a 970 at 4.2GZ with 24GB of DDR3 1600 with a OCZ vertex 3 240 and the new creative labs Z series sound card.

It will crash in minutes running stock as it overheats and comes to a halt. My CPU is water cooled through the H100 venting straight up. I have a massive amount of airflow through the case. However the gap between cards in a triple setup is very small. The 47% fan speed max is just not enough to keep the cards stable. So I set it to allow the fans to go to 100% if need be with the Catalyst override. Still not stable. Overheated crashed the cards. Then I set each card to try and maintain 70C instead of 85C and allow 100% on the fans. This finally worked. The machine is stable (besides battlefield 4's ongoing issues (even BF4 is now only crashing on map loads) it is great.) I've played through WoW for hours, FFXIV AAR for hours and BF4 for hours and TombRaider. It is finally stable. They were not even close to stable out of the box with the fan speed limited. So the "Even with the fans at full speed they arn't as loud as... is BS because full speed was only 47%." My fans now spin faster then 47%. However they do not spin at 100% which is amazingly loud and on par with the FX Nvidia's. They spin at about 65-75% sometimes and its loud. 470's at 100% loud? No not quite, but just barely less. So folks there is Crossfire with SPACE between the cards and there is Tri-Fire or Quad-Fire etc with no space. Be warned that these cards will not react as kindly as reviewed here in a triple or quadfire setup.
 
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Mac75 said:
Well that depends don't it. I have 3 XFX R9 290's not even 290X.s in Tripple Crossfire on the X58 Asus Rampage Extreme III with a 970 at 4.2GZ with 24GB of DDR3 1600 with a OCZ vertex 3 240 and the new creative labs Z series sound card.

It will crash in minutes running stock as it overheats and comes to a halt. My CPU is water cooled through the H100 venting straight up. I have a massive amount of airflow through the case. However the gap between cards in a triple setup is very small. The 47% fan speed max is just not enough to keep the cards stable. So I set it to allow the fans to go to 100% if need be with the Catalyst override. Still not stable. Overheated crashed the cards. Then I set each card to try and maintain 70C instead of 85C and allow 100% on the fans. This finally worked. The machine is stable (besides battlefield 4's ongoing issues (even BF4 is now only crashing on map loads) it is great.) I've played through WoW for hours, FFXIV AAR for hours and BF4 for hours and TombRaider. It is finally stable. They were not even close to stable out of the box with the fan speed limited. So the "Even with the fans at full speed they arn't as loud as... is BS because full speed was only 47%." My fans now spin faster then 47%. However they do not spin at 100% which is amazingly loud and on par with the FX Nvidia's. They spin at about 65-75% sometimes and its loud. 470's at 100% loud? No not quite, but just barely less. So folks there is Crossfire with SPACE between the cards and there is Tri-Fire or Quad-Fire etc with no space. Be warned that these cards will not react as kindly as reviewed here.
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Can you post or email me a picture of that hardware install? I would really like to see it.
 
Awesome homest article, the kind that has kept me coming here first for any new stuff. All these articles make me long for the day when I will have a chance to make a return to PC gaming. With how cold our winter has been so far, those would be perfect in the great frozen midwest.
 
Mac75 said:
Well that depends don't it. I have 3 XFX R9 290's not even 290X.s in Tripple Crossfire on the X58 Asus Rampage Extreme III with a 970 at 4.2GZ with 24GB of DDR3 1600 with a OCZ vertex 3 240 and the new creative labs Z series sound card.
Click to expand...
With that kind of setup, I think you are getting into the place where you should be considering water-cooling your gpus anyway.
 
This is why I have been waiting on a 290x purchase. I am determined tho to watercool these fellas tho.
Gaming monsters but not terribly efficient.

It's good to see a blog on real world experiences posted.
 
nice subjective write up, good read for a lazy friday morning at work. thanks Kyle and Steve. also having my case exhaust air onto my keyboard, and thus my hands, would drive me nuts. my mouse hand sweats enough as it is. looks like a monster built-in desk though.
 
Absolutely I can post it later tonight when I get home :) It's in a Rosewill Blackhawk ultra case with 2 PSU's.
 
i was getting the black screen in csgo yesterday. Before yesterday the only game ive gotten it in was bf4.

what is the best way to connect to the monitor? dp or div?
 
Don't really see the point of this writeup at all. I believe all the 290/290X testing has gone by on plenty of sites, so this is just one man loving his cards and making a blog post.

Don't we all?
 
I had a Sapphire 290 non x, that I returned due to BF4 licensing issue, and now have an XFX 290 non x. Neither one gets very loud imho. They are far from quit, but I cannot hear them over my other case fans until I manually set the fan to 60% or higher. Now at a true 100% fan RPM, the fan is ridiculously loud, but I keep mine set at 55% and run the core at 1050 and memory @ 1350. Temps will get into the mid 80s playing BF4 for a couple hours. My rig is under a very heavy wood desk and no obstructions for 6-7 feet behind the case. You can definitely tell my PC is on, but not loud to me. To me, a loud PC is those old Delta 60mm 6K rpm fans I use to get from AZZO's back in the day.
 
Kyle, what settings do you run FC3 at? I run 290CF and the game is literally unplayable for me at any settings. Even turned down to 720p I can only manage about 70fps on the lowest settings on everything in DX9 mode. If I turn eveyrthing up at 1080p the frame rates are in the single digits (running a single card or both cards it doesn't matter at all).
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Don't really see the point of this writeup at all. I believe all the 290/290X testing has gone by on plenty of sites, so this is just one man loving his cards and making a blog post.

Don't we all?
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A man who gets to test/play with a vast majority of gaming GPUs for the last however many years.
Testing/playing with the cards in his main rig. Not quickly running a bunch of benchmarks to get a review done in a short period of time.
 
LigTasm said:
Kyle, what settings do you run FC3 at? I run 290CF and the game is literally unplayable for me at any settings. Even turned down to 720p I can only manage about 70fps on the lowest settings on everything in DX9 mode. If I turn eveyrthing up at 1080p the frame rates are in the single digits (running a single card or both cards it doesn't matter at all).
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That's definitely not running right. Check out the previously posted article on FC3 from HardOCP. It might help narrow down whats going on.
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
Don't really see the point of this writeup at all. I believe all the 290/290X testing has gone by on plenty of sites, so this is just one man loving his cards and making a blog post.

Don't we all?
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Sorry to have wasted your time.

WorldExclusive said:
Able to swap out Titans for 290Xs. Life must be grand.
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The "review business" does have some perks. :)

LigTasm said:
Kyle, what settings do you run FC3 at? I run 290CF and the game is literally unplayable for me at any settings. Even turned down to 720p I can only manage about 70fps on the lowest settings on everything in DX9 mode. If I turn eveyrthing up at 1080p the frame rates are in the single digits (running a single card or both cards it doesn't matter at all).
Click to expand...

I pretty much mirrored the settings that Brent outlined in our 290X CF review.
 
Thanks for the extended experience testing Kyle. I'm seriously considering a 290(x) for my SteamBox. I'm in the same boat as you; looking for a suitable 4K display that fits my budget.
 
Modred189 said:
With that kind of setup, I think you are getting into the place where you should be considering water-cooling your gpus anyway.
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This x1294120948210948.
780 TI's won't perform much better in that kind of config either.

If I run a single HD 7950 the max temps are like 80C when overclocked quite high (On the Twin Frozr), but if I run that card stock with my second 7950, it goes to 100C within in seconds of starting a game(micro-atx, little space between the cards). I found a way to tweak it to work and stay at lower temperatures, plus some ghetto-modding, but the realistic option would be to watercool it.
 
Farmer Boe said:
That's definitely not running right. Check out the previously posted article on FC3 from HardOCP. It might help narrow down whats going on.
Click to expand...


I know it isn't, but it plays perfectly in the same system with my spare GTX 580. Every other game plays fine on the 290's. I haven't been able to figure it out since I've had the cards.
 
who spends that much money on a top of the line card and wants it to be quiet? only an idiot would do that.
 
Well, that's it.
I'm swapping my 680 4GB FTW cards in SLI for dual R9-290Xs
Just placed an order with Newegg.
Since I've been getting a lot into bitcoin/litecoin mining, I figured 2 cards should be good enough to game and make a little money.
Plus I live in Chicago, so I could use a little heat in my apartment. :)
Great article!
 
fausto412 said:
who spends that much money on a top of the line card and wants it to be quiet? only an idiot would do that.
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How does having a different tolerance for noise qualify someone as an idiot? No matter how you cut it, the cooler on the 290 series is cheap compared to NVIDIA's offerings. It makes the card cheaper at the expense of noise. It's a toss up but wanting a quiet computer is a certainly valid preference.
 
Rizen said:
How does having a different tolerance for noise qualify someone as an idiot? No matter how you cut it, the cooler on the 290 series is cheap compared to NVIDIA's offerings. It makes the card cheaper at the expense of noise. It's a toss up but wanting a quiet computer is a certainly valid preference.
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...........this. Quieter, similarly performing, with better software, and WITHOUT the AMD issues. I'm sorry to bring it up but it's a true fact that you just deal with more bullshit with AMD than you do with nvidia. As i'm sure you're well aware, Rizen. I remember with 7970CF that my PCs would never wake from sleep without crashing. So I disabled sleep. Then "forced vsync" never worked in the control panel. Then there's the well established frame pacing issue with crossfire that still isn't fixed for DX9 and eyefinity on the 79xx series. Bullshit AMD issues. Now, I did enjoy the 7970CF because the performance was awesome and they overclocked insanely well. But. Having been green side for a while? I noticed that the bullshit AMD issues that I had from time to time just don't happen anymore. And I have quieter cards to boot now.

Besides which, I don't see how the Titan is even relevant. An overclocked GTX 780 is significantly faster than the 290X anyway, it has much more overclocking headroom. But, the 780 won't make you money via litecoins.

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.
 
Thank you. I found the section on noise particularly informative and useful.

I was disappointed to see no 4K testing but IIRC the frame pacing doesn't work at 4K yet, right?
 
B1zz said:
you know...for SCIENCE. :cool:
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lol science.. I have actually been looking through the water cooling options for the entire machine. I'm estimating about 1400 dollars to do so. It's a lot of money up front to do so, but future upgrades would only cost around 30% of that for replacement water blocks, so I'm abit on the fence about it. However it would be quieter.

I had 3 570's with a 470 for physics in it before and that was louder.
The 4 470's before that was even louder.
With both the 470's and 570's all I had to do was adjust the fan profile to more of a diagonal instead of a curve to increase speed a-bit faster when it got hot to avoid issues.

The 290s just can not be left stock without significant space between them.

The blackhawk ultra comes with:
　-Front(first layer) 2x 140mm Red LED Fan (pre-installed)
　-Front(second layer) 2x 140mm Fan (pre-installed)
　-Rear 1x 140mm Fan (pre-installed)
　-Top fans removed and changed to the Corsair Hydro H100 with twin 120's.
The 3rd fan is removed due to PSU installation.
　or 3x 120/140mm Fan (option)
　-Side 1x 230mm Fan (pre-installed)
　or 9x 120mm Fan (option)
　-Bottom 1x 120/140mm Fan (option)

There is a lot in my box and I do try and make it tidy, but not to the exceptional level that I have seen some of the members here go with custom rigs. My word have some of you done fantastic things.
 
xoleras said:
...........this. Quieter, similarly performing, with better software, and WITHOUT the AMD issues. I'm sorry to bring it up but it's a true fact that you just deal with more bullshit with AMD than you do with nvidia. As i'm sure you're well aware, Rizen. I remember with 7970CF that my PCs would never wake from sleep without crashing. So I disabled sleep. Then "forced vsync" never worked in the control panel. Then there's the well established frame pacing issue with crossfire that still isn't fixed for DX9 and eyefinity on the 79xx series. Bullshit AMD issues. Now, I did enjoy the 7970CF because the performance was awesome and they overclocked insanely well. But. Having been green side for a while? I noticed that the bullshit AMD issues that I had from time to time just don't happen anymore. And I have quieter cards to boot now.

Besides which, I don't see how the Titan is even relevant. An overclocked GTX 780 is significantly faster than the 290X anyway, it has much more overclocking headroom. But, the 780 won't make you money via litecoins.

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.
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Yeah, I have used cards from both manufacturers extensively, and my experience with NVIDIA has been much less troublesome. I dropped the money on the 290X cards because of the opportunity to help pay them off via mining, I want to play with Mantle, I am interested in TruAudio, and they seem to be ideal cards for high resolution gaming. I am, obviously, not impressed by the problems I am having with X58. I am hoping we get a good response from AMD on that situation.

That said, for anyone who is not in that particular situation (I doubt many people are running 290X Crossfire on an X58 system), I wouldn't hesitate to give these cards a try. High end GPUs have been hot and loud for years, these aren't any worse than past offerings by both brands.
 
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