AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB Review Comment Thread

[IRQ Conflict]

Heh, I have yet to not experience buyers remorse to one degree or another. Your right. It is the nature of things.

 

[Bond007]

Nice review. AMD really needs to spend a few minutes and design a better reference heat sink. That said if you are a person that doesn't care about noise or know you will water cool this is THE CARD to have IMO. Otherwise for the majority its going to be a wait and see on non-reference designs...DCII anyone?

 

[THS]

It is still LOUD and HOT !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Probably better to go with 780 after price cuts simply since its much cooler and quieter.

 

[magictorch]

Nice review, finally back to flagship performance cards for under $500.
AMD really is making things interesting these days.
Once the custom coolers come out it might be time to finally move on from my 480's, just hope they have stock on these things.

 

[sf101]

These upped the fan’s rotational speed to 47% which unsurprisingly leveled out frequencies and boosted the car’s performance metrics in several TDP-limited games. Ironically, such a move could also spell trouble for anyone who bought an R9 290X so if you have one, you may want to turn away right about now.

other than that the card seems to perform well and is priced well . until i see what the 290x can do with better temps im starting to believe this card is alittle to close performance wise to the X variant for the 150-250$ price differences currently.

 

[great_big_abyss]

Hey Sky did you see what Toms did with the accelero extreme 3? If these things had a proper cooler they would push frames like crazy. Water cooling on these will be insane, board partners should really be able to knock this one out of the park for AMD.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-review-benchmark,3659-19.html

This. Link. Right. Here.

This shows what the AIB partners will be capable of. Significantly increased performance over the 290X, and much, much, much quieter. The 7V fans are barely audible, even in an open test bench, and once you put the 12V fans in a case, I doubt you'd be able to hear much of them either.

They should have put this cooler on the 290X to see what that beast is capable of.

Oh, speaking of...Sky, I really like what TOMS did with the videos showing what the coolers sound like. Maybe this is something that you can look into.... Saying that a video card is 47dB loud doesn't mean a damn thing, as my brain doesn't equate dB into actual noise.

 

[sf101]

Amd was just silly to release these cards with poor reference coolers even if it gave the aftermarket little to work with they should have released the card with a triple fan cooler or at-least a dual fan cooler and stopped the noise/heat bashing before it even began.

all this arguing over how loud and warm these cards are was so stupidly unnecessary imho someone should have put a stop to the leaf blower idea.

 

[SKYMTL]

Sorry for not responding. I just moved into a new house the day before yesterday and with that, this review and the GTX 780 all coming this week, it's been crazy hectic. Only got full internet access back last night at 8PM.

Anyways, I want to mention that NVIDIA WAS quite hesitant to lower their prices and it was only through extreme AMD pressure that they revised costs lower. Even now, from a raw framerate perspective, their cards can't compete on the value front. However, if you want free games and SHIELD, they're the way to go.

 

[hero1]

Alright! I mean oh damn! I mean woohoo! Let's see what Nvidia does with the price cuts and I hope my patience to not grab a second GTX 780 pays off. My next rig will have AMD in it for sure! Love the competition.

 

[great_big_abyss]

I doubt Nvidia will cut prices any farther.