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

mesyn191 said:
At 1440p at stock clocks it'll beat a 780GTX for $100 less. That situation only improves if you go to 1600p.

If you OC both the 780GTX gets a negligible lead at 1440p and probably gets tied at 1600p. For $100 less still.

Its not a perfect card by any means but to say you need a 4K monitor to make the R9 290X worthwhile is silly.
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I'm actually looking at it from the European point of view: I can find this card on sale for 520€ in Italy:
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/59777-gainward-geforce-gtx-780-phantom-glh/

But the 290x I'm being told will start at 550€, which means that the 290x with stock cooler is MORE expensive than the superclocked gtx780 with custom cooler, at least in Europe.
 
kache said:
But the 290x I'm being told will start at 550€,
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Your info. might not be right.

We just got the official R9 290X price from AMD and the price of this card in Europe is €399 + VAT. In Germany the card should end up at 474.8 euro, France 477 euro, Austria 478.8 and in Denmark and Croatia the card should end up at 498.75 euro due to their high VAT rate of 25 percent.
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VAT kinda fucks it up for you Euros. Stupid EU regressive taxation system keeping fun toys outta your hands wouldn't be AMD's fault.
 
This card is so good in so many points that it is hard to find points to whine about:
-We have 2x DL-DVI back
-CF issues solved
-4k capable out of the box

The last time [H] was so excited about a VGA review was back in the 4870x2 review, the first card that allowed 1600p gaming with AA enabled. That card also charged USD 549 back in set/2008, but power consumption, temps and noise were even worst than now.

I think AMD went wrong with max temp, there is no way under the very same silicon node that a GPU whose max temp was 80ºC suddenly becomes safe to operate at 95ºC. My 4870x2 suffered a thermal death and those 290X are bound to die of similar causes. On the other hand the 7990 triple fan cooler was a total failure in CF and nobody managed to benchmark those on air alone. Considering that an OC 780 is still faster than an OC 290x and we see that AMD pushed the clocks too high for such a massive chip, way beyond the optimal temp x performance point. I expect a "Ghz edition" in the future to counter the 780Ti. Price is great, performance is good, but i do agree that if i had the money for a 120Hz system today, i would choose 780 not a 290x. let see what custom coolers can do for this card.
 
Ever since buying my Titan, I knew this day would come.

I didn't think it would come so soon though :p
 
This review gave me a [H]ardon. I've pretty much gone nVidia all the way up until now.. But with this pricing, and me in the market for a January build, unless nVidia drops their prices, I'm going to wind up with one of these.

With all the penny pinching I've been doing the last year or so to get this up and going, I'm looking for the best bang for the buck!
 
Nvidia overpriced their cards starting with GTX770, curse them.

AMD followed Nvidia in their pricing schemas, releasing a native overclocked card that confuses people in believing that it is something really good at a much cheaper price, which is not.

R290x is indeed a good video card that can be compared to GTX780, but at 550 USD? Where is the win? Sell it at $399 and all fanboys will shutup, either busy buying or crying. Once upon time ATI user can say "My $300 card fries your sorry $600 Nvidia crap with the right mods/setup." Those times are no more.
 
Zarathustra[H];1040312614 said:
Ever since buying my Titan, I knew this day would come.

I didn't think it would come so soon though :p
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I shouldn't complain. I got a good 8 months of top of the line GPU performance out of it though. That's actually not bad.
 
I really don't think Nvidia has a clue at this time what to do when AMD's new flagship "Titan" card is priced at $550 now. Don't think they counted on that one...
 
serious said:
...
R290x is indeed a good video card that can be compared to GTX780, but at 550 USD? Where is the win? ...
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That's some mighty strong troll-bait there. :p

pcjunkie said:
I really don't think Nvidia has a clue at this time what to do when AMD's new flagship "Titan" card is priced at $550 now. Don't think they counted on that one...
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Indeed. I feel that Titan will literally come back to haunt NVidia. Unsellable card, especially right now.
 
Looks like a great card, hopefully it will drive down prices across the board.

The real X factor here is how these will perform with proper cooling, as the reference cooler seems to be woefully inadequate. Can't wait to see performance under water...
 
serious said:
Nvidia overpriced their cards starting with GTX770, curse them.

AMD followed Nvidia in their pricing schemas, releasing a native overclocked card that confuses people in believing that it is something really good at a much cheaper price, which is not.

R290x is indeed a good video card that can be compared to GTX780, but at 550 USD? Where is the win? Sell it at $399 and all fanboys will shutup, either busy buying or crying. Once upon time ATI user can say "My $300 card fries your sorry $600 Nvidia crap with the right mods/setup." Those times are no more.
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There is no such thing as overpricing, as long as people keep buying.

Market demand drives the price. They obviously priced their cards at a price people were willing to pay, as sales were pretty good. This means the price was fair.

They were - in part - able to do this because AMD didn't have as high performance for a while. Now that AMD has caught up in performance, and done so at a very reasonable price, there will ahve to be price drops from Nvidia.

This is how competition works, and drives more performance at lower and lower prices.

Nvidia (and AMD) can, (AND SHOULD) charge as much as they possibly can for their GPU's without driving away customers. We need to stop the entitled whiny bitching on here about pricing.

Market forces (specifically how much people are willing to pay) drives the pricing of video cards and everything else, and companies will always charge as much as they can get away with, and they should, because they have fiduciary responsibility to their investors to turn as much of a profit on their investment as possible. If they can make more on an investment, they are morally and ethically bound to do so.

It's how capitalism works. If you don't like it, feel free to move to Soviet Russia. Oh wait, you can't, because the alternatives to capitalism FAILED and caused Soviet Russia to collapse. :p


Essentially, no one owes you a fast video card at a affordable price. Companies like Nvidia and AMD (and pretty much every for profit company out there) exist for one reason and one reason only. To make money for their investors. The fact that you wind up with a video card in the process is purely incidental :p
 
lamovnik said:
R9 290x Fan Noise Test
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Silly that is a FX5800U. Kids these days jeez:rolleyes:

Zarathustra[H];1040312649 said:
There is no such thing as overpricing, as long as people keep buying. Market demand drives the price. They obviously priced their cards at a price people were willing to pay, as sales were pretty good. This means the price was fair.
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This is a "econ 101" view of things, the real world works differently, which is why we end up with things like the housing bubble and the Global Financial Crisis. The Market is not always price things accurate nor is it immune to manipulation, even in a Laissez Faire political environment.
 
atp1916 said:
That's some mighty strong troll-bait there. :p



Indeed. I feel that Titan will literally come back to haunt NVidia. Unsellable card, especially right now.
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Nvidia made their money off Titan, to them it was a success I think.
 
pcjunkie said:
I really don't think Nvidia has a clue at this time what to do when AMD's new flagship "Titan" card is priced at $550 now. Don't think they counted on that one...
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Nah,

They knew all along that the Titan had a limited shelf life.

They sold it at a high margin to attract top of the line buyers who had to have the best, but they knew it was only a matter of time until next gen cards would come out that would force them to come down in price.

This happens EVERY video card generation cycle. :p

It will be interesting to see what they do next.

I foresee a discontinuation of TITAN, a pricedrop on the GTX780 (and everything down the line) and a new better binned higher clocked GTX780 variant (GTX785?) to come out to counter the 290X until Nvidias next gen GPU's come out.
 
pcjunkie said:
I really don't think Nvidia has a clue at this time what to do when AMD's new flagship "Titan" card is priced at $550 now. Don't think they counted on that one...
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I think nvidia is pretty happy that it took amd 8 months to equal 780 performance. I dont think amd counted on the 290 being as slow as it was, and thus had to put the "petal to the metal" and clock the card so high that it throttles itself nearly 300mhz at stock speeds with a jet engine attempting to cool it.
 
serious said:
Nvidia overpriced their cards starting with GTX770, curse them.

AMD followed Nvidia in their pricing schemas, releasing a native overclocked card that confuses people in believing that it is something really good at a much cheaper price, which is not.

R290x is indeed a good video card that can be compared to GTX780, but at 550 USD? Where is the win? Sell it at $399 and all fanboys will shutup, either busy buying or crying. Once upon time ATI user can say "My $300 card fries your sorry $600 Nvidia crap with the right mods/setup." Those times are no more.
Click to expand...

I suppose the "win" is the $100 you still have in your pocket compared to the 780. Don't get me wrong $399 would be great but I just don't think it's realistic from a business standpoint, this is still 28nm and the biggest die AMD have ever produced.

Care to link me some benches of this historic $300 AMD card that "fries" a $600 Nvidia card? I can't recall those times ever existing.
 
NickJames said:
Nvidia made their money off Titan, to them it was a success I think.
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Agreed. They knew it was a short term thing. They threw it out there, a short term, high margin product for people who demand the very top of the line.

They made their margin on it, and they knew from the start it wasn't going to last forever.
 
NickJames said:
Nvidia made their money off Titan, to them it was a success I think.
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I dunno. I honestly believe they did it 'just cuz'....Sorta like AMD's Centurion FX chip.

I wouldn't be surprised if they only broke even, or at best made some pocket change. I'd also be curious how much it costs NVidia to produce each Titan.

Titan was a hard sell before, and now it's an impossible sell outside of the fanboy market.
 
Im glad to see this release from AMD. Im sure within a month , we will see Nvidia price drops on all the high end cards, a new 780 variant that's tweaked enough to beat the 290x by 3-4% in benchmark priced at $599, and around the new year, a newer Titan revision that just smokes anything AMD has.
 
atp1916 said:
I wouldn't be surprised if they only broke even, or at best made some pocket change...was a hard sell before, and now it's an impossible sell outside of the fanboy market.
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Yup. Titan was there essentially for marketing purposes and to generate hype. At $1K a pop they probably sold very few. Most people won't even spend $300 on a video card.
 
They are some seriously nice numbers, especially at that price point. If I'd seen it 2 months ago I would've definitely gone batting for the Red team again. Excellent work AMD!

Let's hope this spurs Nvidia into some serious soul searching and they can put out a real performer in their next gen cards.
 
It makes me so happy that ATI brought the card out with this level of performance and at this price point. It's like a giant middle finger to Nvidia on pricing, and the same middle finger I've been giving them this entire generation. I've been using Nvidia cards with only one exception defecting to ATI for about 8 years now, but unless Nvidia responds with appropriate price adjustments, they can take a long walk off a short pier.
 
one swell foop said:
It makes me so happy that ATI brought the card out with this level of performance and at this price point. It's like a giant middle finger to Nvidia on pricing, and the same middle finger I've been giving them this entire generation. I've been using Nvidia cards with only one exception defecting to ATI for about 8 years now, but unless Nvidia responds with appropriate price adjustments, they can take a long walk off a short pier.
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I don't think they need to adjust pricing with this generation, but Maxwell cards will hopefully come down in price.
 
For me, Titan would only be a total waste if you bought one as of today. With the release of the R290x, a Titan at $1k is complete nonsense. If anyone out there is dumb enough to pay $1000 for Titan today, when proof is out there that the R290x is practically on par with it, they would need smacked in the head.

However for a good while it WAS the fastest single GPU card, so for some users it justified the high price.

Hypothetically, If Nvidia released a TITAN ULTRA in 2 months, that was 30% faster then a Titan/R290x and slapped a $1000 price on it. People would still buy it. Because some people will pay a premium for the best.

AMD could have done the same thing with the 290x. They could have put it at 650-750 and the price would have pretty much been on par with what's currently out there. Thankfully AMD didn't do that though, and they priced the card where a high end card should be priced imo.
 
This kind of article (and not being yet another apple owned tech site) is what makes [H] the 1st place for enthusiasts. Thank you Brent and Kyle for the great job!
 
I hope that version with custom coolers like Asus come out in the next few weeks.. I'd love to see what they'll be able to do compared to reference coolers, which we all know are fairly crap.
 
I believe Nvidia's counter-offer will be a $50 (MAX!!!) reduction in their pricing scheme, and their fanboys will rejoice like it's the second coming...:rolleyes: I'm sure AMD is counting on that, and they most likely based the 290x's price with a whole lot more "wiggle room" than Nvidia would ever allow for... $50 price drops from both camps in the next 60 days are almost certain... I'm sitting back and enjoying this soap-opera...:cool:
 
Interested to know if the "Red Mod" would help these cards any for folks not interested in a full WC setup.

I was never able to get it to work on my 7970, but if you could get it to work I wonder what kind of temps you'd see.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Keep in mind on that temp this is a reference card. I'm looking forward to custom cards with custom cooling, and perhaps better power efficiency as well, to improve upon the thermals and power. We shall see.
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Outstanding review! I always enjoy it when you exceed yourself...;) Good job! Yea, if people want a beast like this that consumes less power and runs cooler they'll need to wait until late 2014-2015 for 22nms. However, if people want to make good use of those expensive 1k-watt PSU's now, one of these cards begins to justify the expenditure.

And to the guy who lamented the power drain of using Quad x-fire. why tf would you ever need *four* of these beasts? This card doesn't even begin to stretch its legs until we get to 4k resolutions--where it clobbers the Titan (Titanfall for real)--that costs 2x as much! To the guy who worries about overclocking, why tf would I worry about "overclocking" it when it delivers that kind of performance? Seems a very silly thing to say, "Oh, yea, it runs 10-15% faster at 4K resolutions than cards costing 2x as much, but I can't overclock it very much!"...:rolleyes:

Brent, your review also mentioned that with the user freeing up the fan controls to run as they might that it opens up a performance delta over the Titan even at < 4k resolutions, if I read that right...? Impressive review for an impressive product.

Wanted to add that my HD5770 ran under full load @ 100C for years without a problem--it's still running in another box. AMD said it was normal and not to worry about it--which I don't anymore--if they say it'll run forever at 100C, I believe 'em...;)
 
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Personally i would never trade build quality over performance. My thoughts exactly, are being described at Anandtech's review for the 290X :

"But with that said, although the 290X has a clear grip on performance and price it does come at the cost of power and cooling. With GTX Titan and GTX 780 NVIDIA set the bar for power efficiency and cooling performance on a high-end card, and while it’s not necessarily something that’s out of AMD’s reach it’s the kind of thing that’s only sustainable with high video card prices, which is not where AMD has decided to take the 290X. By focusing on high performance AMD has had to push quite a bit of power through 290X, and by focusing on price they had to do so without blowing their budget on cooling. The end result is that the 290X is more power hungry than any comparable high-end card, and while AMD is able to effectively dissipate that much heat the resulting cooling performance (as measured by noise) is at best mediocre."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/20

As i said on the top, i would never trade build quality in order to gain few more fps. It's obvious that AMD decided for marketing reasons and better price to let their cards operating at 95 celsius. This raises questions about how much the longevity of such a GPU can be.
Lot of people praises AMD for their low-cost cards, but when this low cost comes with sacrifising quality, that is something i will personally never praise.
 
People complaining about the temps.... IT WAS DESIGNED TO RUN AT 95! You can change that in the settings if you want, but it WILL RUN AT 95 because that is what the cooling algorithm converges to INTENTIONALLY. Yes its hot, but you can change that in Overdrive, and you'll be able to do that without losing performance once the custom coolers are available.
 
KickAssCop said:
I want to congratulate AMD to achieve 7 months ago performance levels at more heat, noise, possibility of driver issues and only 100 dollars less. LAWL!

If you don't get it then you must be living under a rock.
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try 400 less -- we are talking titan level here. Of course you can't see that can you?
 
Sith'ari said:
Personally i would never trade build quality over performance. My thoughts exactly, are being described at Anandtech's review for the 290X :

"But with that said, although the 290X has a clear grip on performance and price it does come at the cost of power and cooling. With GTX Titan and GTX 780 NVIDIA set the bar for power efficiency and cooling performance on a high-end card, and while it&#8217;s not necessarily something that&#8217;s out of AMD&#8217;s reach it&#8217;s the kind of thing that&#8217;s only sustainable with high video card prices, which is not where AMD has decided to take the 290X. By focusing on high performance AMD has had to push quite a bit of power through 290X, and by focusing on price they had to do so without blowing their budget on cooling. The end result is that the 290X is more power hungry than any comparable high-end card, and while AMD is able to effectively dissipate that much heat the resulting cooling performance (as measured by noise) is at best mediocre."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7457/the-radeon-r9-290x-review/20

As i said on the top, i would never trade build quality in order to gain few more fps. It's obvious that AMD decided for marketing reasons and better price to let their cards operating at 95 celsius. This raises questions about how much the longevity of such a GPU can be.
Lot of people praises AMD for their low-cost cards, but when this low cost comes with sacrifising quality, that is something i will personally never praise.
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AMD designed it to run at 95*. That means the operating temperatures of the GPU die and the components around it that reach those temps are much higher than 95. As an engineer familiar with this type of requirement, I would not be concerned about longevity as this was taken into account in the design of the card. This is no sacrifice in quality. In fact, the components are probably of higher quality as they were chosen for the purpose of being able to operate continuously at these temperatures.
 
Flyinfinni said:
People complaining about the temps.... IT WAS DESIGNED TO RUN AT 95! You can change that in the settings if you want, but it WILL RUN AT 95 because that is what the cooling algorithm converges to INTENTIONALLY. Yes its hot, but you can change that in Overdrive, and you'll be able to do that without losing performance once the custom coolers are available.
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its "intentionally" run at that temp because AMD had to push the clocks so far to be able to equal the 780. And its clearly evident when the stock card has to throttle ~300mhz to stay under temp.
 
ZaC851 said:
its "intentionally" run at that temp because AMD had to push the clocks so far to be able to beat the 780. And its clearly evident when the stock card has to throttle ~300mhz to stay under temp.
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They may have pushed clocks to reach the performance level they were aiming for. That does not change that the engineering was still done with a 95* operating temperature in mind. It still beats the 780 when it throttles, so is it really an issue? They engineered the card to a 95 degree operation spec, and thats what it does. And it performs extremely well at that level, no matter what the clocks are dynamically throttling to.
All I'm saying is that everyone seems to be freaking out over the 95 degree temps, but ultimately, this number makes no difference if the card was designed to run at that temp.
 
Flyinfinni said:
AMD designed it to run at 95*. That means the operating temperatures of the GPU die and the components around it that reach those temps are much higher than 95. As an engineer familiar with this type of requirement, I would not be concerned about longevity as this was taken into account in the design of the card. This is no sacrifice in quality. In fact, the components are probably of higher quality as they were chosen for the purpose of being able to operate continuously at these temperatures.
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That is it. People have forgotten when the gtx480 came out from nVidia running at 92-98 degrees from the factory. Those cards were engineered to handle it and thus there were very few temperature related failures. High temperatures are not a concern if the components running and exposed to those temperatures are designed to handle it.
 
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