My Sapphire 290 Tri-X with my beloved 780 GTX Ti

madgun

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 11, 2006
Messages
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I just got my Sapphire 290 Tri X cards in the mail after an almost month into the order.

Just posting some sneak peeks. The cards are humongous and beautiful at the same time. But nothing matches the beauty of my 780 GTx Ti :D








 
Nice! Were you able to get those at a decent price? What are you going to do with the 780ti now?

I do agree that the 780ti and TITAN have to best looking coolers out there right now. It's nice that we have some aesthetic available to us in the factory coolers nowadays.

Anyone remember this gem?
10436208595cUSd31HIx_1_1_l.jpg


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the first card to have a dual-slot cooling solution and everyone hated it for that fact (the fact that it was dual-slot, not the noise level :p)?
 
I got mine too!!! Yesterday!!!

I've ordered from amazon and I too waited about a month. However, I did pay $488 which is not bad right now.
 
Nice! Were you able to get those at a decent price? What are you going to do with the 780ti now?

I do agree that the 780ti and TITAN have to best looking coolers out there right now. It's nice that we have some aesthetic available to us in the factory coolers nowadays.

Anyone remember this gem?
10436208595cUSd31HIx_1_1_l.jpg


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the first card to have a dual-slot cooling solution and everyone hated it for that fact (the fact that it was dual-slot, not the noise level :p)?

Yea I pretty much got them at 488$ a piece. I still plan to hang onto the 780 GTX Ti till I get a good price on it. It would be extremely hard to let it go but at the same time I am not really tied to any team in particular.

It could very well be that I use my TriX for mining only and 780 GTX Ti for gaming.
 
I just returned my 780 ti for one of these same Sapphire cards. I put it on Uber mode... it's still loud as hell -- wtf?
 
Thats why I am not getting rid of my 780 GTX Ti yet. I just want to make sure the cards are quiet under crossfire. I don't plan to you use these under uber mode though since that's an insane profile.
 
Haven't seen this tested in xfire.
Let us know how temps go.

I'm mining in xfire. The tri-x 290 is on top and right underneath I've got a reference 290, the tri-x actually keeps the reference card cooler!!!

I'm getting around 75-80 with fans on auto and pretty quiet. The tri-x cooler does blow more air into the case than the reference though.
 
Got the two cards in crossfire. To my surprise they aren't that loud. I ran a loop of heaven and firestrike. Haven't done any monitoring so far but I wish the AMD side had something similar to EVGA precision. So far I am only relying on GPU-Z.

On a side note, I have noticed that the lower card is sitting perfectly straight since these cards are huge and heavy. I am just worried whether my PCI-E slot on the motherboard could bend.
 
I ran a pair of 6800 Ultras in SLI.
My solution to the leaf blower noise was gaming headphones.
This was back when Klipsch Promedia speakers were the norm.
I could actually still hear the cards over cranked up promedia 5.1's playing Unreal Tournament.

1995 - 2006 I'd built $20k worth of gaming boxes for myself and embraced the Xbox 360.
 
Just found out that the ASICS quality for both of my 290s is 80% and 86% respectively. Too bad I won't be overclocking since I don't really need the extra power in crossfire anyways.

Seems to me that the way TriX run, they are most likely binned. Not only do these run cooler, thanks to the custom cooling solution but way lower load temps of 78C under crossfire too. I haven't done any voltage monitoring yet nor tried the uber mode since I did not notice any throttling thus far.
 
im facing this dilemma for several months now ; 780ti vs 2 x 290

problems :
-inflated price of 290s due mining
-argument that one great card is better that crossfire / sli (support based)
-rather lackluster CF 290 results (might be due early drivers)
-Mantle
-heat and noise
-i already bough a better psu to run CF and a board to support it
-Maxwell high end pushed back

:mad:
 
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I must say that I am not too happy with crossfire. Every so often it disables automatically :/

Drivers are buggier on AMD side than Nvidia. Owning the 780 GTX Ti has been a pleasant experience and I took it for granted that things would just work without any tweaking.

But a single 290 TriX is still pretty powerful. Although it doesn't come anywhere near my overclocked 780 GTX Ti in terms of raw performance but I like that it can match a default clocked Ti so well.
 
I must say that I am not too happy with crossfire. Every so often it disables automatically :/

Drivers are buggier on AMD side than Nvidia. Owning the 780 GTX Ti has been a pleasant experience and I took it for granted that things would just work without any tweaking.

But a single 290 TriX is still pretty powerful. Although it doesn't come anywhere near my overclocked 780 GTX Ti in terms of raw performance but I like that it can match a default clocked Ti so well.

You either didn't do a proper driver install (meaning you had nVIDIA drivers on the system (or older drivers) and simply installed the new Catalysts on top) or you're being disingenuous.
 
Nah, it's a clean windows install. For now I have perfect stability with 13.12 and would wait for 14.1 WHQL version to drop in later in the month.

And what's so difficult about installing the drivers or are you guys used to a more complicated approach than a simple click. I simply downloaded 14.1 beta drivers from AMD's website and did an express install on a clean windows 8.1 installation. Is there something that I am missing?

I guess my issues are fairly similar to this guy:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=454&threadid=171406

You either didn't do a proper driver install (meaning you had nVIDIA drivers on the system (or older drivers) and simply installed the new Catalysts on top) or you're being disingenuous.

I get a BSOD in every game or benchmark with 14.1's so please judge me next time just because I have a 780 GTX Ti too. You guys are the reason that most of the threads here have to be closed. Either give a suggestion or don't post at all. Next time I won't tolerate any personal comments.
 
Nah, it's a clean windows install. For now I have perfect stability with 13.12 and would wait for 14.1 WHQL version to drop in later in the month.

And what's so difficult about installing the drivers or are you guys used to a more complicated approach than a simple click. I simply downloaded 14.1 beta drivers from AMD's website and did an express install on a clean windows 8.1 installation. Is there something that I am missing?

I guess my issues are fairly similar to this guy:

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=454&threadid=171406

You either didn't do a proper driver install (meaning you had nVIDIA drivers on the system (or older drivers) and simply installed the new Catalysts on top) or you're being disingenuous.
I get a BSOD in every game or benchmark with 14.1's so please judge me next time just because I have a 780 GTX Ti too. You guys are the reason that most of the threads here have to be closed. Either give a suggestion or don't post at all. Next time I won't tolerate any personal comments.
Agreed. I don't understand the personal hate aimed toward anyone who posts a negative experience just because they own the "other" card. My experience with AMD/ATi in the past with their drivers has tarnished my opinion of them. This is from my own personal experience.

I was, in fact, willing to give AMD another try with a R9 290X because it has 780 Ti-level performance for ~$200 less. Unfortunately I couldn't find one at a reasonable price when I decided to upgrade, so I went with a GTX 780. In my opinion, I think not having to deal with the driver problems on AMD's side was probably worth it in the long run.

Those AMD owners out there who have had a great experience with their products, I am happy for you, and I harbor no ill-will toward one side or another due to your choice of product. Let us all act like hardware enthusiasts, not console fanboys :D.
 
So far I have had a good experience with crossfire. Minimal micro-stuttering and no black screens. Mantle didn't give me a big performance boost though so I did my testing with 13.12 drivers. I am already running an Intel 3960X @ 4.5Ghz.

In Bf4 a single 780 GTX Ti (1200 / 7.4Ghz ) @ 2560 x 1600 with everything set to ULTRA but with 2X AA gives me 70-90 fps.

780 Ti with same settings but 4X AA: 65-80 fps.

Where as on the same settings, crossfire 290 TriX clocked at 1050 / 5.2Ghz and with 4X AA, gives me 100-125 fps.

The performance dip when AA is increased is more pronounced on the 290s than on the 780 GTX Ti which hardly looses 5 fps or so.

780 GTX Ti continues to be the best single GPU in my mind especially considering the amount of overlock I was able to achieve and gain free performance out of it. But if you guys can get a custom 290 like a TriX or Direct CU II in the right price. I would recommend going with two since the main performance benefit comes under crossfire.

Will update after doing some Mantle vs. Direct 3D comparisons.
 
It'll be must to see some comparisons between dx and mantle from someone who's not a fan boy. See people round net saying they got 20 fps increase on 4770k with 290x lol. They're either fan boys or they didn't know to unpack cores.
 
Dude, he is not a fanboy. He is comparing a single 780ti to 290X crossfire, of course the 290X crossfire is going to win.

Calm down for a second and re-read his post. In any case it sounds like the Tri-X 290X cards are highly impressive, although AMD fell out of favor in my eyes due to software being worse - didn't have good experiences in that regard. That said, it seems that they made significant strides with crossfire and the 290 series which is great to hear. I want AMD to improve and match NV in terms of software, competition is always a good thing.

Edit: scratch that, you're talking DX vs Mantle. I would point out that the Mantle driver is rather broken at this point. Not for EVERYONE of course, but many people are having issues, not just madgun. Even for folks who can get it working in BF4, it does manage to break other things.
 
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I simply downloaded 14.1 beta drivers from AMD's website and did an express install on a clean windows 8.1 installation. Is there something that I am missing?
Not a thing. Contrary to popular belief, you could've installed the drivers without an OS wipe, without removing any other drivers (even NVIDIA's) and even without removing the other card (assuming it was still being properly powered).

And done it blindfolded, if you really wanted to. Windows knows what it's doing these days when it comes to graphics adapters and their drivers.
 
It'll be must to see some comparisons between dx and mantle from someone who's not a fan boy. See people round net saying they got 20 fps increase on 4770k with 290x lol. They're either fan boys or they didn't know to unpack cores.


Yea the AMD 14.1 drivers aren't fully baked yet in my opinion, random crashes and freezes is what I have experienced. But honestly I can confirm that I have not seen more than 10 - 15 fps increase in performance even under crossfire at the resolution I am running. I am not sure what settings people are using under Mantle so any help or indicators would be great so that I may get more performance.

Under my settings, everything's already GPU limited hence Mantle's main advantage is marginalized it seems.
 
It's super buggy but I got a good 12 fps increase in a few places.
I uninstalled 14.1b cos I can barely play BF4 with them. The frame rate will eventually be 1/2'ed for no reason (in context it is kind of funny that this driver has both extremes: boosted and butchered FPS).
 
Crossfire issues still persist even after the third Mantle edition of the drivers. Single card seems to work fine with Mantle though. Anyone else experiencing issues running Mantle on crossfired 290s with the latest drivers?
 
Nice! Were you able to get those at a decent price? What are you going to do with the 780ti now?

I do agree that the 780ti and TITAN have to best looking coolers out there right now. It's nice that we have some aesthetic available to us in the factory coolers nowadays.

Anyone remember this gem?
10436208595cUSd31HIx_1_1_l.jpg


Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the first card to have a dual-slot cooling solution and everyone hated it for that fact (the fact that it was dual-slot, not the noise level :p)?

First factory double slot cooler. The reason it ess hated because it exhausted the hot air where it pulledin fresh air, resulting in massive temp rises, then onto of it all it was very loud.

Couple the terrible engineering job if the cooler with the sub standard performance, it was a flop.
 
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