AMD Radeon R9 290X CrossFire Video Card Review @ [H]

WorldExclusive said:
Overreaction. New AMD Cards on new Arches vs Many Months Old Cards on refreshed Arches....Did you expect something different?

Look out for the 780Ti next week.
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One problem with your comment, the 780, titan and the 290x are all refreshes, or second generation cards. The 780 is second gen kepler, the 290x is second gen GCN.
 
YOWZA! :eek: Impressive!

I find this new card from AMD feels a lot more like a node change, not a card on the same process! Huge gains in all areas!

Looks like AMD also re-engineered their crossfire solution completely, and did their homework! Maybe the 780ti can help close the huge performance gap, but that's also a huge "maybe".

Very curious to see how the 290 performs & price! :cool:

Can't wait for custom cooler cards.

Kudos to AMD for delivering this round, and top notch comprehensive review!
 
Nenu said:
Wow, I'm impressed, I didnt see this coming!

If anyone has a 200x card, is Skyrim smooth now?
I read that it was never smooth on earlier AMD cards.
My brother is in the market for a new card and has just started Skyrim.
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Skyrim is an Nvidia optimized game. It runs better on Nvidia hardware and SLI works "ok". AMD single cards will work great and the game vanilla will run just as smooth but CF has almost no effect. The thing about Skyrim is the mods, once you start modding the crap out of the game you will see it favors Nvidia. Especially ENB graphics which is a shader that was developed for Nvidia cards on Nvidia hardware. That's not to say it doesn't work on AMD, it's just some features require a workaround. Also Nvidia's Game Profile SSAO seems to look and run better than ENB SSAO on Skyrim.
 
[H] staff, I was wondering why R9 290x crossfire wasn't awarded Gold?
Looking back there have been several, Titan Tri-Sli, 660ti Sli etc that have won Gold awards.
Is this because the Cf performance isn't far and above the competition? Or just simply better.
 
xoleras said:
It's not an unfair question on Bababooey's part. Far Cry 3 has a rather broken engine that stutters on a lot of hardware, and not just AMD hardware. I personally don't know how good xfire is in comparison to SLI for FC3 specifically, but like I said - not an unfair question. FC3 is kind of a mess in terms of smoothness and input lag in my experience, but it doesn't detract from an excellent overall game. Kind of similar to how Fallout 3 and New Vegas are - both of those games stutter on every hardware combination i've tried.
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Thanks and thats a great analogy actually.
 
I would have loved to see this review done with the test setup in a case. With the heat generated by these cards it would have been interesting to see if any throttling would happen in crossfire because of the case temps rising. Also to see if the added heat in the case affected the overclock of cpu, etc.
 
Looks like you are going to need a Silverstone Raven, or Corsair Carbide 540 for two of these if you want to them on air.
 
darkstarcow said:
Holy fuck, on the very first page they stated it was all done in uber mode and also suggest setting the fans to 100%.

I am honestly quite shocked that not only does AMD now have the fastest video card, but it is smoother then Nvidia when using multiple cards. The only way things could be any worse for Nvidia right now is if the card used as much or less power then the Titan or 780, considering the performance increase over both those cards, the power usage is 100% justified.
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Clearly you only read the first page. The 780 and Titan both draw less power idle (although minimal) and under load.
 
Thanks for the great review as always. Very thorough, concise, and to the point. Never seen such domination by one company in a review before. I hope Nvidia has something special in R&D to counter AMD choke hold in the high end video card sector. I guess I will be saving for 290x CrossfireX in the future.

Thanks once again for the eye-opening review.
 
At $500, the GTX780 is way overpriced, bring it down to $399 and it's price would actually make sense. I like nVidia, and like all the stuff they put into Geforce Experience, and I appreciate a lot of the new angles they are taking, but they seem to be full of themselves when it comes to pricing.
 
Did not expect to see these multi-gpu results since single gpu performance was so close.
 
King Icewind said:
Looks like you are going to need a Silverstone Raven, or Corsair Carbide 540 for two of these if you want to them on air.
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I think my HAF 922 would be up to the challenge. Now if only I had $1200 to give it a try.
 
PhantomTaco said:
For the sake of comparing performance of newer titles, I'd personally like to see Arkham City and AC4 Black Flag as well. Also from what I can see there are others on the horizon such as watch dogs and COD ghosts. I don't think it's fair to say most newer games are AMD optimized given that. As for being graphics heavy games while I do agree, I agree less so with the idea of only using AMD optimized games to present and objective overview (though Metro is admittedly nv optimized, that's still only one of the games reveiwed).
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So you're complaining because [H] didn't give us benchmarks for games that haven't even been release yet? [H] is good, but they can't time travel.
 
I'm anxiously waiting to see [H]'s BF4 assessment, especially when Mantle drops in December.
 
darkstarcow said:
What do you mean it is sweet once you water cool them? [H] didn't water cool their cards and yet the 290x x-fire spanked the shit out of the 780 and titan sli. This whole "heat wahhhhhh" crap is getting out of hand, if these cards can beat the shit out of nvidias offerings while running at 95c, it should be really interesting to see what happens when they get custom coolers.
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{H} mentioned the noise issue running two of the reference cards (headache inducing). It isn't all about the heat in this case but they didn't mention worrying on a triple setup concerning heat. Water would make it all very manageable just have to throw another radiator in the case...
 
WorldExclusive said:
Overreaction. New AMD Cards on new Arches vs Many Months Old Cards on refreshed Arches....Did you expect something different?

Look out for the 780Ti next week.
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with Metro LL SLI scaling broken at 4K, yeah its correct to say this is an embarassment for Nvidia. Metro LL is a TWIMTBP title released 6 months ago. what were Nvidia doing when blowing the 4K horn in Aug/Sep. Nvidia started the 4K fight but AMD sure as hell settled it. :D

AMD has dismantled Nvidia at the high end. there are few more factors to still bring the hurt to Nvidia.

1. custom R9 290X - Toxic, Matrix and Lightning with powerful PCB, improved power phases, better coolers.

2. Mantle in Dec on BF4.
 
A bit unfortunate that you did not do overclocked versus overclocked comparisons also on top of stock performance numbers.

Good review and CFX results, however, these cards are just not for me unless AIB partners come up with better cooling.
 
They will; almost everyone here is curious as to how much better cooling. GTX 780 Ti or uber-custom 290x (MSI Lightning, ASUS Matrix ...) Holding off my card purchase until I see reviews/numbers on those.

KickAssCop said:
Good review and CFX results, however, these cards are just not for me unless AIB partners come up with better cooling.
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LOL i did not need to see this today.

Now I want to dump my 7970xfire setup and get 2 of these.... but I'd new a new PSU as well to do it...

I wonder how the heat factor would play out in my case? Rosewill Thor v2. It has some monster airflow.
 
Skyrim? Skyrim has been fine on AMD single cards for a while now. I used to have to cap FPS with AB to get smooth FPS outdoors in some areas. I believe they started tuning their drivers for Skyrim latency issues around Cat 13.2 . Now Crossfire is another thing. I've not tried that. Last I heard the MGPU frame pacing they've added to their drivers only impacts DX11 or 10 and they haven't tuned them for DX 9 yet. That may have changed and I haven't heard that it has.
 
Did you guys take any frame consistency measurements at all?
Simply saying "it looked smooth" doesn't, IMO, quite make it.

If a subjective judgement of "smooth or chunky" is sufficient, then why bother to measure framerate in the first place? ;)
 
Great Review. To me, this is even more impressive that the 290x is running so good on the first round of drivers. I would think that as time passes, AMD will optimize their drivers and we will see even bigger gains. On the Nvidia side - these are mature cards and drivers, so we probably won't see much more from them.

While I was tempted by the$499 price on the 780s, I am now leaning towards the 290 or 290x. Can't wait to see these cards with a good cooling solution (Sapphire Toxic or Asus CU).
 
Smooth or chunky is pretty definitive, especially when compare them right after one another. When you drive or ride in a car you can pretty much always easily tell which one drives/rides better.
 
Boggins said:
So you're complaining because [H] didn't give us benchmarks for games that haven't even been release yet? [H] is good, but they can't time travel.
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I'm pretty sure both AC4 and Batman are out already? And I did say the others weren't out yet and didn't imply they should be included but rather answered to someone else saying all the new titles were AMD optimized.
 
hmm any chance of a review or test (when the 290 is out )of a 290x as first card and a 290(non x) as second on say1600p
if it works
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
This card is becoming a real embarrassment for nVidia, especially as the drivers for it get better. They got complacent, stopped innovating, and started overpricing their cards and now they got pwned. It's like the Radeon 9700 Pro all over again.
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THIS IS the 9700 pro of this generation! :D

Very impressed with the 4k xfire results. 60+ FPS in a resource intensive games?? WOW!!
 
PhantomTaco said:
I'm pretty sure both AC4 and Batman are out already? And I did say the others weren't out yet and didn't imply they should be included but rather answered to someone else saying all the new titles were AMD optimized.
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AC4 came out 2 days ago, Kyle or Brent probably did the review over the last few days. They would've had to delay the review to squeeze AC4 in there. They'll probably test those games next once the 290 rolls around.
 
PhantomTaco said:
I'm pretty sure both AC4 and Batman are out already? And I did say the others weren't out yet and didn't imply they should be included but rather answered to someone else saying all the new titles were AMD optimized.
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AC4 isn't out for PC yet. Batman just came out and they need time to test it. I'm sure they'll do an article soon and show how it runs on all this shiny hardware.
 
I try to keep an open mind about any new hardware technology either on the horizon or released. Any rumors pertaining to pre-review performance are read with a grain of salt. Keeping in mind past Crossfire performance I had already formed a partial opinion that AMD's history would be, to a certain extent, repeating itself.

With the above said, after reading [H]ardOCP's review I'm totally floored at Crossfire performance demonstrated today. The improvements AMD have made to Crossfire are leaps and bounds better than previous implementations. It is readily apparent AMD has learned from their past mistakes and implemented solid solutions to overcome shortcomings. One, which appears to be a critical piece, is elimination of the Crossfire Bridge and routing communication between graphic cards through the PCIe bus. Coupled with Frame-Pacing, the performance gains are impressive.

If I didn't have the personal preference of running PhysX and hadn't already invested into a GTX Titan I'd be definitely giving AMD another go. $1,100 for R9 290X Crossfire vs. $2,000 for GTX Titan SLI is really tempting; despite the noise levels, heat and power requirements. Ah, well, maybe in a year or two I'll change my mind yet right now I'm happy with what I have.

Thanks for the review, [H] Crew. I greatly appreciate the time and effort you all put into reviews. As always, very well done.
 
Ozymandias said:
AC4 isn't out for PC yet. Batman just came out and they need time to test it. I'm sure they'll do an article soon and show how it runs on all this shiny hardware.
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Doh! Forgot about Ubisoft's PC release date policy.. 3-4 weeks after console launch.
 
Brent/Kyle:

On page 9 in the power consumption you listed system power usage for the R9 290X Crossfire at 780 watts under load. The system your running is an I7 3770k at 4.8.

I'm running a 2500K at 4.4ghz with the rest of the spec in my sig. I have a Corsair HX750 PSU, would I need to get a beefier PSU to crossfire the 290x?

I have a 290x on backorder.
 
jorojr said:
I'm anxiously waiting to see [H]'s BF4 assessment, especially when Mantle drops in December.
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Working on BF4 assessment right now and a mantle follow up is planned.

Geonerd said:
Did you guys take any frame consistency measurements at all?
Simply saying "it looked smooth" doesn't, IMO, quite make it.

If a subjective judgement of "smooth or chunky" is sufficient, then why bother to measure framerate in the first place? ;)
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FRAPS takes the frame consistency measurements by default and drops them in a file for us, but it is also not the best way to measure frame consistency due to where it is within the rendering process. I could go fishing for more official forum comments, but we've been doing the subjective analysis of the smoothness of gameplay for years prior to the whole frame time debacle.

As for measuring frame rate, you're right - there really isn't much value added to our subjective analysis by recording and publishing frame rates. However, our audience tends to like to see _some_ form of evidence about what we are experiencing and frame rate is one way to provide that evidence (even though it doesn't tell the whole story).

NickJames said:
AC4 came out 2 days ago, Kyle or Brent probably did the review over the last few days. They would've had to delay the review to squeeze AC4 in there. They'll probably test those games next once the 290 rolls around.
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Gameplay reviews take a while to do - I wouldn't expect one to drop less than a week after a game is released - I'd imagine we'll get to them eventually but that decision and timeline is far above my paygrade around here.
 
are the 780/Titan not scaling well in SLI? I wonder why their power so is much lower,(as is their performance) in SLI but much less of a difference in a single card configuration.
 
Pastuch said:
Brent/Kyle:

On page 9 in the power consumption you listed system power usage for the R9 290X Crossfire at 780 watts under load. The system your running is an I7 3770k at 4.8.

I'm running a 2500K at 4.4ghz with the rest of the spec in my sig. I have a Corsair HX750 PSU, would I need to get a beefier PSU to crossfire the 290x?

I have a 290x on backorder.
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Keep in mind that the draw that we supply is the wall draw, and the 750w on your PSU is power delivered to the computer. Even if your PSU had 90% efficiency, that'd mean its delivering ~710w when it is drawing 780w from the wall. Realistically, its probably closer to 80-85% efficiency...

Thus, overall, when gaming, you're probably going to be running fairly close to the limit of what your PSU can do (depending on how many other gadgets you have installed), but it might be able to pull it off...
 
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