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

amdgamer said:
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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We just recently moved off our GTX 470 cards that ran at 100% for weeks at a time and the GPU temps never equated to failure. Given the advances of on-PCB over the last few years, I in no way have worries about 290X operating temperatures. We will see what happens with retail products in real gamers' boxes.
 
maboblivion said:
for ppl who bitch bout noise

http://youtu.be/qspdnAYiiug?t=1m49s FX 5800
vs
http://youtu.be/QQhqOKKAq7o?t=22s r9 290x @ the end of the video its at 100% (but when set to 100% doesn t run at 100% unless forced so take that into consideration as uber +100% fan will be 65% to 75% )

I'll take the wooshing sound of a r9 290x vs the grinding sound of a fx 5800 any day.
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I agree, some cards have a mechanical *wrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeee* sound while the 290X just sounds like it's blowing large amounts of air. Wouldn't bother me much since I have a HEPA filter running in my room 24/7.
 
polonyc2 said:
I don't care about the 4k resolutions...1600p/1200p is all that matters to me and the bottom line is that you can get an AMD 'Titan' for half the price of an Nvidia Titan...great job by AMD...now if Nvidia drops the price on the 780 to match the 290x then Nvidia can still come out on top...then again with Mantle coming out that adds another unknown element into the mix
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Agreed. Similar performance + less heat/power + PhysX....Given NV history... they won't budge on prices.
 
Great pricing AMD -- I must admit to being tempted to unload my two 7970s and pick up a 290x -- too bad it won't happen fast enough wtih BF4 coming out next tues.

It's painfully easy to see some of the people here so butthurt trying to justify their $1000-$2000 dollar titan setups. It's even funnier when a few here have spouted the "Well just wait till the 780Ti" -- umm okay? It's suddenly okay for you to whip out a card that technically doesn't exist yet to make your big green nvidia boner that much harder?

Does the 290x run hot? seems that way, do I care? Nope. For almost HALF the cost of a titan, I have titan performance.


Aside -- Ive actually always been a fan of reference blower style coolers. With my oc'd 7970s in crossfire, I want the hot air out of my case ASAP, with the aftermarket coolers dumping the heat IN the case... that's just moving the problem into a slightly larger container. I wouldn't want two 290x's dumping almost 800W of heat into my case

Another aside -- I'm only running a corsair 850 - crossfire 290x's is a bit out of the question for me.

I'm in that crappy spot where one 290x isn't powerful enough vs my current system, and two 290x's is total and complete overkill cost and power requirement wise. (I game at 1440p)
 
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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+1. Same reason why I have more faith on reference cards. I can always replace the cooler with a 3rd party cooler or go liquid. I dont have that option with the components. And sure there'll be custom cooler designed cards from resellers with a quality beefy cooler but who knows what corners they cut with the reference design..with exceptions to TOP/Lightning series cards
 
collegeboy69us said:
try 400 less -- we are talking titan level here. Of course you can't see that can you?
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I am not talking about stock performance. I can't even remember the last cards I ran at stock settings. I have had more than Titan performance at 650 price tag since May of this year (6 months ago). Seems like you did not see that, did you.

Either way, thanks to the poster who posted the OC review video. Their 780 was at 1110 Mhz it seems. If that is true then R9 290X truly is an irrelevant card for me. Oh well, time to wait for 780 Ti or something similar priced a bit later (maybe Q1 2014?).
 
ZaC851 said:
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.
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lol, seriously have you even read the review here? In quiet mode with the fan only at 40 degrees it's beating the 780. But you, of course are spinning that in a bad light.

To me this shows that with custom coolers or water cooling that the R9 290x will be a very good performer indeed. And hasn't it already been breaking benchmarking world records.
 
maboblivion said:
for ppl who bitch bout noise
http://youtu.be/qspdnAYiiug?t=1m49s FX 5800
vs
http://youtu.be/QQhqOKKAq7o?t=22s r9 290x @ the end of the video its at 100% (but when set to 100% doesn t run at 100% unless forced so take that into consideration as uber +100% fan will be 65% to 75% )
I'll take the wooshing sound of a r9 290x vs the grinding sound of a fx 5800 any day.
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Mate are you serious? You are comparing the worst series that NVidia ever made, with what it is supposed to be AMD's pride?:eek:
I would NEVER buy the FX5800 just as i would also NEVER buy the 290X for the noise i just heard in the video you posted !!! The 5800 and the 290X is like you are having a truck always on your ears!!
 
Sith'ari said:
Mate are you serious? You are comparing the worst series that NVidia ever made, with what it is supposed to be AMD's pride?:eek:
I would NEVER buy the FX5800 just as i would also NEVER buy the 290X for the noise i just heard in the video you posted !!! The 5800 and the 290X is like you are having a truck always on your ears!!
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You mean you would never by a 290X with reference cooling right?
 
KickAssCop said:
I am not talking about stock performance. I can't even remember the last cards I ran at stock settings. I have had more than Titan performance at 650 price tag since May of this year (6 months ago). Seems like you did not see that, did you.

Either way, thanks to the poster who posted the OC review video. Their 780 was at 1110 Mhz it seems. If that is true then R9 290X truly is an irrelevant card for me. Oh well, time to wait for 780 Ti or something similar priced a bit later (maybe Q1 2014?).
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It's an irrelevant card to anyone with a 780 or titan already. And the Ti will also be irrelevant, it's based on the Gk110, there isn't going to be any surprises with performance.

And it's only been 5 months, unless you somehow got your 780 earlier than the release date.
 
reaper12 said:
It's an irrelevant card to anyone with a 780 or titan already. And the Ti will also be irrelevant, it's based on the Gk110, there isn't going to be any surprises with performance.

And it's only been 5 months, unless you somehow got your 780 earlier than the release date.
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May to October is normally 6 months. I am not counting days but whatever lol.
 
pcjunkie said:
You mean you would never by a 290X with reference cooling right?
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Of course it is what i mean, but if the aftermarket coolers starts to appear, it is only logical to assume that prices will also get higher than the referance model.
 
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’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.
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No sacrifice of quality has been made--that's silly...;) It requires more power and in the process runs hotter than any other high-performance card in its performance class (Titan), which is why it outperforms the Titan. It is simply a more powerful gpu.

You cannot "let" a card run at 95C or at 80C or whatever C, unless you design it to run at those temps. Otherwise, the gpu will quickly fail and you may as well have never brought it to market. As I mentioned above, my little HD 5770 ran under load at 100C for years, and is still going strong in another box. That's because AMD designed it to run indefinitely at 100C. Has nothing to do with quality--unless maybe it's the inverse of what you say, and gpus that can run indefinitely at higher temps are simply better engineered in order to do so. That seems more likely, actually.
 
Sith'ari said:
Mate are you serious? You are comparing the worst series that NVidia ever made, with what it is supposed to be AMD's pride?:eek:
I would NEVER buy the FX5800 just as i would also NEVER buy the 290X for the noise i just heard in the video you posted !!! The 5800 and the 290X is like you are having a truck always on your ears!!
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yep, i m saying that at 55% fan uber mode in a case, sound argument is moot.

and as pointed out in the video review fan doesn t reach 100% when @ 100% unless you force it with some 3rd party software.
If you can't live with high noise, you probably could lower the temp target ,get less noise and get 780 performance still (for 100$ less). tho this [H] ... let's not have any of that talk.

:eek:
 
KickAssCop said:
May to October is normally 6 months. I am not counting days but whatever lol.
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May to June is 1 month
June to July is 2 months
July to August is 3 months
August to September is 4 months
September to October is 5 months

No need to count days. Can't believe I did that.
 
Sith'ari said:
Of course it is what i mean, but if the aftermarket coolers starts to appear, it is only logical to assume that prices will also get higher than the referance model.
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Cuz Nvidia cards with aftermarket coolers NEVER cost more than reference design, right??? :rolleyes:
 
This thread is getting ridiculous, the only ones making either the heat or noise of the 290X a deal killer, are nvidia users that were not interested in even buying the card to begin with, but have no problem going out of their way to crap on it. Every review out there has been critical of both the heat and noise of the reference cooler, yet are still giving the card their highest praise and recommendations. Happy with your Titan? 780 OC? great! move on.
 
AllBlackFan said:
May to June is 1 month
June to July is 2 months
July to August is 3 months
August to September is 4 months
September to October is 5 months

No need to count days. Can't believe I did that.
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I was counting both months since I only remember release date of R9 which is towards end of month. 5 or 6 is useless discussion anyways, hence, the whatever.

/OT
 
This new card is pretty exciting. Not just the performance and all that (I can't afford it, myself), but the fact that it may drive down the price of some nice, high quality video cards that are already out.
 
JBark said:
Same as the 7000 series. Their HDMI 1.4 port is backed up by a much faster chip than is required for HDMI 1.4, so technically can support 4k@60. More than likely we'll see a driver update to enable HDMI 2.0 now that the spec has finally been released. This is much like some of the current 4k TVs that are getting a firmware update to enable HDMI 2.0 on their ports.

AMD called it FastHDMI when they first released it with the 7000 series.
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Thank you for providing actual information. I was almost giving up on this thread after page after page of lame trolling from people who have SO MUCH to say about a product they claim is not interesting.
 
Dangman said:
Wanted some clarification on a part from the article:

By any ports, does this actually mean that I can have two monitors on the DVI ports and the 3rd monitor on a HDMI port? That's still one of my biggest gripes with AMD in that I have to use a display-port capable monitor or a display-port adapter that may or may not work if I want to use three monitors on one card.
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correct
 
mzs_biteme said:
Cuz Nvidia cards with aftermarket coolers NEVER cost more than reference design, right??? :rolleyes:
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What i'm trying to say is that with the amount of noise the reference 290X produces is something i personally can't tolerate. I like my ears to be safe :D
I never said that NVidia's aftermarket coolers are not more expensive than referance. It's an assumption you made not me!! I comment the referance 290X because the referance is being reviewed here!!!:rolleyes:
 
Real exciting part is mantle it can be the 'bomb' i think after few months a lot of people will change their mind about this card lol
 
Sith'ari said:
What i'm trying to say is that with the amount of noise the reference 290X produces is something i personally can't tolerate. I like my ears to be safe :D
I never said that NVidia's aftermarket coolers are not more expensive than referance. It's an assumption you made not me!! I comment the referance 290X because the referance is being reviewed here!!!:rolleyes:
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Yet you yourself stated that you would never buy this card, based on the current reviews, which btw, are all reference cooler cards..... Kinda premature conclusion, don't you think... I myself would NEVER buy reference cooler design, EVER. PERIOD! What I do, is wait at least six months for; 1) price drop, 2) a PLETHORA of after-market cooler designs with much better thermal/noise characteristics...

But to totally dismiss a product based on early sample reviews, and deem it "inferior in quality" because of the temperatures is was designed to run at, is pure fanboism... But, that's just my "assumption"...:cool:
 
One thing i don't understand with stock cooler being so bad why didn't Amd allow custom coolers since day 1 ?
 
Everyone complaining about the thermals, might I just add, this was a reference designed card. I think most of us here are more interested in the custom cards. Custom cards will have custom cooling, custom fan profiles, and perhaps custom power efficiency. I look toward these cards, to hopefully solve the thermal issues.

Second, 95c is completely a fine temperature according to AMD. I asked AMD extensively about this, and shared my concerns, and told AMD how I knew all of you would react to this high temperature. AMD ensures us that 95c is well below the thermal threshold of the GPU, it is a safe temperature for this GPU. Believe me, I know the shock value of 95c though, it is hot, no question about it. I'm just relaying what AMD told me, AMD was confident in the temperature.

Keep in mind also the temperature is so high because the fan is capped at 40 or 55%. Unlock the fan to go up to 100% and it isn't so bad. Fan speed is keeping the GPU quite warm. Again why I think custom cards will solve this problem.

If I were going to buy a 290X, I would be looking at what custom cards are offered.
 
mzs_biteme said:
Yet you yourself stated that you would never buy this card, based on the current reviews, which btw, are all reference cooler cards..... Kinda premature conclusion, don't you think... I myself would NEVER buy reference cooler design, EVER. PERIOD! What I do, is wait at least six months for; 1) price drop, 2) a PLETHORA of after-market cooler designs with much better thermal/noise characteristics...

But to totally dismiss a product based on early sample reviews, and deem it "inferior in quality" because of the temperatures is was designed to run at, is pure fanboism... But, that's just my "assumption"...:cool:
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-First of all, i, like yourself, i don't buy referance models, nomatter how low their prices are.
-Secondly, take a look at page 21, my respond at "pcjunkie's" question, who asked me if i was only refering at the referance model or the aftermarkets as well.
-And thirdly, my 1st comment on this thread, about 290X quallity was based at the 290X Anandtech's review, as i posted a link about their review also..
 
Brent_Justice said:
Everyone complaining about the thermals, might I just add, this was a reference designed card. I think most of us here are more interested in the custom cards. Custom cards will have custom cooling, custom fan profiles, and perhaps custom power efficiency. I look toward these cards, to hopefully solve the thermal issues.

Second, 95c is completely a fine temperature according to AMD. I asked AMD extensively about this, and shared my concerns, and told AMD how I knew all of you would react to this high temperature. AMD ensures us that 95c is well below the thermal threshold of the GPU, it is a safe temperature for this GPU. Believe me, I know the shock value of 95c though, it is hot, no question about it. I'm just relaying what AMD told me, AMD was confident in the temperature.

Keep in mind also the temperature is so high because the fan is capped at 40 or 55%. Unlock the fan to go up to 100% and it isn't so bad. Fan speed is keeping the GPU quite warm. Again why I think custom cards will solve this problem.

If I were going to buy a 290X, I would be looking at what custom cards are offered.
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Any word on when custom cards will hit the market?
 
With Mantle approaching and all of the consoles optimized for AMD it looks like I'll be jumping to team Red.

I will miss physx as it looks pretty damn slick in Planetside 2 and Hawken but it looks like in the long run AMD is the better choice.

280X for me as I'm still 1080p unless the 770 drops to $299 before EOY. Although I'd prefer the 3GB VRAM over the 2GB in the 770 with upcoming titles so VRAM hungry.

But DAMN will I miss Physx in PS2 (those grav-lifts! @ 2:10)
 
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Sith'ari said:
-....
-And thirdly, my 1st comment on this thread, about 290X quallity was based at the 290X Anandtech's review, as i posted a link about their review also..
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Anand's article doesn't say anything about AMD's quality of this card per se... It simply states that there's room for improvement of the current (reference) cooler design:

"... while this specific cooler implementation leaves room for improvement the underlying technology has turned out rather well thanks to AMD’s PowerTune improvements. Now that AMD has fine grained control over GPU clockspeeds and voltages and the necessary hardware to monitor and control the full spectrum of power/temp/noise, it opens up the door to more meaningful ways of adjusting the card and monitoring its status...."

This is to be expected with a any new product.

Like I said, 6 months will bring better prices, much better coolers, maybe BIOS updates, or even silicone tweaks....

No reason to dismiss all they have achieved with 290X, based on a couple non-issues....;)
 
CrazyRob said:
From page 4 of the review:


Am I reading this correctly? Are you saying that 4k 60hz is supported over the HDMI1.4b connection? Or are you saying 4k is supported over hdmi, and 4k 60hz over displayport? Everything I read about HDMI 1.4b (I'm no expert but I can has google) indicates it added support for 1080p 120hz, but does not support 4k 60hz.
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The latter. 4K over HDMI.... 4K 60Hz over DP.
 
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