Monday, September 23rd 2013
Radeon R9 290X Pictured, Tested, Beats Titan
Here are the first pictures of AMD's next-generation flagship graphics card, the Radeon R9 290X. If the naming caught you off-guard, our older article on AMD's new nomenclature could help. Pictured below is the AMD reference-design board of the R9 290X. It's big, and doesn't have too much going on with its design. At least it doesn't look Fisher Price like its predecessor. This reference design card is all that you'll be able to buy initially, and non-reference design cards could launch much later.
With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.
It gets better, the source also put out benchmark figures.
The R9 290X is significantly faster than NVIDIA's GeForce TITAN graphics card among the two games it was tested on, Aliens vs. Predators 3, and Battlefield 3. It all boils down to pricing. AMD could cash in on its performance premium, by overpricing the card much like it did with HD 7990 "Malta," or it could torch NVIDIA's high-end lineup by competitively pricing the card.
Source:
DG's Nerdy Story
With its cooler taken apart, the PCB is signature AMD, you find digital-PWM voltage regulation, Volterra and CPL (Cooperbusmann) chippery, and, well, the more obvious components, the GPU and memory. The GPU, which many sources point at being built on the existing 28 nm silicon fab process, and looks significantly bigger than "Tahiti." The chip is surrounded by not twelve, but sixteen memory chips, which could indicate a 512-bit wide memory interface. At 6.00 GHz, we're talking about 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. Other rumored specifications include 2,816 stream processors, four independent tessellation units, 176 TMUs, and anywhere between 32 and 64 ROPs. There's talk of DirectX 11.2 support.
The R9 290X is significantly faster than NVIDIA's GeForce TITAN graphics card among the two games it was tested on, Aliens vs. Predators 3, and Battlefield 3. It all boils down to pricing. AMD could cash in on its performance premium, by overpricing the card much like it did with HD 7990 "Malta," or it could torch NVIDIA's high-end lineup by competitively pricing the card.
142 Comments on Radeon R9 290X Pictured, Tested, Beats Titan
(i hate people)
EDIT. Seriously though, if this is correct it would be quite nice in any case.
you too random number name dude:p
"That said we believe 1020 MHz (1GHz) clock was obtained with this mode enabled. The real clock is lower (around 900 MHz). Without Turbo R9 290X will be slower than TITAN."
PS $600 from what I am reading, so don't be so sure that the price will be extremely high.
Don't forget than AMD has nothing over $400 if I am not mistaken. You can't have two models with $600 difference in price (I am not counting 7990) from $400 to $1000 because Nvidia is going to do a party in between these prices.
They cant confirm anything and are just posting bits of guessing nothing concrete. They have 9 articles with nothing solid other then speculations and guestimations.
"We believe" is another way of saying we have no clue.
No-one knows or has confirmed the base or the boost clocks.
As were both your posts in a new gen card release thread dude if you have a driver issue goto a driver issue thread and drop a complaint there because doing it here IS just trollin if you intend that or not;)wow i didnt see kaveri having that many shaders , that would make a nice steam box;):p
im expecting to pay 450 -550uk notes for a R9 290X:D
And on the topic of crappiness, AMD need to get rid of that POS blower cooler. It works fine at stock clocks, but as soon as you try squeezing an overclock out of it you need to push the fan speeds to unacceptable noise levels to keep the card reasonably cool.
I have my 7970's running at 1100/1500 (CCC Overdrive) and you can hear them during gaming (when you take the headphones off) but i wouldn't call that woosh unacceptable. It's not like my old X1900XT. Their reference coolers have improved.
Burned by drivers? That was an nVidia feature iirc...