AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB Review Comment Thread

[BootlegUsher]

When you see what a direct performance impact lower temperatures have on this card, I am amazed AMD didn't make a better cooler for it.

 

[SKYMTL]

7 Nov watch for the 780ti.....and big price drops on Titans

TITAN won't be moving one iota. :thumb:

 

[sf101]

None of the 290 cards are any good right now. Too much noise and heat. Everyone is ragging on the crappy reference coolers but this was done for a reason. Price point. So that the vendors can come up with aftermarket stuff that can kill the reference cards, AT A PREMIUM. You'll have your $399 heat guns, or your $489 Direct CUIII's. Simple economics. What's the real price of a 290/290x then?

I'm thinking that if your current rig plays at an acceptable rate then wait until the die shrink on the next gen. My 7970's in CF are killing everything on max detail I'm pegged at 120fps in Arkhan Origins, BF4 and some CoD ghosts benches I ran this morning.

except that aftermarket cards are typically like 10-20$ difference then the reference cards except in the cases where its say a lightning or a mars card where they add power phases / voltage adjusters ect then its a different case and most of the time those features arent even needed for ambient overclocking and are a waste usually not getting any more fps than a well cooled reference card on average. they typically only become use full under sub ambient cooling where the extra voltage is needed.

I should add that with the performance difference the 3 fan accellero cooler made on the 290x, AMD almost seems silly to had not spent a little bit more making a dual or triple fan ref cooler and charging back the customer the 25$ but i guess rounded off to 50 and 100's is better for marketing than amazing performing silent cool cards?.

I'm still debating which card i will buy and watercool myself so this whole noise / heat argument is really meh to me anyways.

 

[ontariotl]

Getting a twitchy finger on the add to cart for two R9 290 and two EK waterblocks right now. Time to retire tri-sli GTX670 FTW in surround gaming....very tempting.

It's the drivers that scare me from going back to Red. I'm glad to see the microstutter in xfire is non existent in the R9 series. Its just xfire updates with games that I have a main concern with their drivers.

 

[sf101]

yea 290 @ 400$ with a water block is looking quite good haha

 

[Boggins]

Getting a twitchy finger on the add to cart for two R9 290 and two EK waterblocks right now. Time to retire tri-sli GTX670 FTW in surround gaming....very tempting.

It's the drivers that scare me from going back to Red. I'm glad to see the microstutter in xfire is non existent in the R9 series. Its just xfire updates with games that I have a main concern with their drivers.

NVIDIA SLI hasn't been doing so hot either the past year. So many games come broken when it comes to SLI, and NVIDIA has been putting little effort into developer relations to ensure smooth launches.

It seems the more popular multi-GPU configurations get, the worse support becomes. This comes at a time when multi-GPU is more necessary than ever. Single card setups just don't offer enough power above 1080p.

 

[Gordon freemen]

TITAN won't be moving one iota. :thumb:

nvidia are to stubborn. I mean have you even seen Tom Peterson talk ?

NVIDIA SLI hasn't been doing so hot either the past year. So many games come broken when it comes to SLI, and NVIDIA has been putting little effort into developer relations to ensure smooth launches.

It seems the more popular multi-GPU configurations get, the worse support becomes. This comes at a time when multi-GPU is more necessary than ever. Single card setups just don't offer enough power above 1080p.

You do understand that less than 1% of gamers on Steam use a resolution greater than 1080P right. Everyone talks about extreme resoultion gaming when everyone is still on 1080P.

 

[great_big_abyss]

You do understand that less than 1% of gamers on Steam use a resolution greater than 1080P right. Everyone talks about extreme resoultion gaming when everyone is still on 1080P.

The boundaries must be pushed in order for the masses to move on. It is always the enthusiasts (in their respective hobbies) who push the boundaries, therefore the talk on enthusiast sites will always be about what is 'better than mainstream'. In this case, 4K.

The capability or incapability of hardware to maintain 4K resolutions will be discussed in enthusiast circles until there is something 'better' than 4K...the next boundary, so to speak.

 

[Gordon freemen]

The boundaries must be pushed in order for the masses to move on. It is always the enthusiasts (in their respective hobbies) who push the boundaries, therefore the talk on enthusiast sites will always be about what is 'better than mainstream'. In this case, 4K.

The capability or incapability of hardware to maintain 4K resolutions will be discussed in enthusiast circles until there is something 'better' than 4K...the next boundary, so to speak.

Technology enthusiasts do not drive anything. It's the "markets" not enthusiast consumers that dictate where the developmental resources that the major corporations like Intel and AMD, Samsung, etc will be allocated. The money is in consoles and 1080P which means that as far as gaming goes it will be another 10 year cycle before 4K becomes a mainstream gaming standard . 4K is a long long way away before becoming a main stay and replacing 1080P as the new standard adopted by the overwhelming majority of game developers. Also resolution is not the be all and end all of quality. There are many more factors to IQ than resolution. Even Apple with the iphone 5s actually backed off on the megapixle count to instead focus on enhancing color reproduction, contrast, and overall accuracy of each pixle instead of just adding more. Sometimes less is more and quality is better than quantity. People do not understand that more resolution means nothing if the quality is not there. Not to mention that 4k will look absolutely awkward in a small way on any monitor under probably 40" which renders it kind of moot for most PC gamers.

 

[Squeetard]

It's competition that drives any market. You see how much R&D goes into making the fastest card on the planet. They take turns topping each other. Remember how quickly AMD came out with crossfire to counter nVidia's SLI? Even though they can count on that Halo product being less than 1% of sales and probably a market loss.

No different than the auto market and how much money they toss into racing. Win on Sunday, sell on Monday. And they aint buying a 1.5 million dollar NASCAR, they are buying a Camry because they saw a Toyota branded car win yesterday.