Radeon R9 290X Pitted Against GeForce GTX TITAN in Early Review

[Lionheart]

I love the smell of new hardware in the morning.

whether these are better than Nvidia cards or not, I still love it when new GPU's come out, all the speculation and "discussion" is interesting and sometimes fun to read.

Personally for me, a 280x or a 7970.

I love that smell as well, speaking of new PC hardware smell I just recently bought a new Seasonic PSU, installed & everything... 5mins later my bedroom smelt like new PC hardware lolz

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I love that smell as well, speaking of new PC hardware smell I just recently bought a new Seasonic PSU, installed & everything... 5mins later my bedroom smelt like new PC hardware lolz

Few years ago, my mate bought a new corsair PSU, fitted it, and all it did was fill his room with the magic smoke naughty electronic stuff makes.

 

[Fatal]

I will wait for Wizz to test it. All the other testers I can care less about. Even if its between the Titan and the 780 it still will help with lower prices. That's a win for all

 

[sweet]

I will wait for Wizz to test it. All the other testers I can care less about. Even if its between the Titan and the 780 it still will help with lower prices. That's a win for all

There is no doubt that this card is above Titan clock to clock. However, this beast will consume bunch of wattage and that tiny fan is not really reliable. The card is capable at the top, but it is not perfect. Hope that the custom versions will be available soon.

 

[Lionheart]

Few years ago, my mate bought a new corsair PSU, fitted it, and all it did was fill his room with the magic smoke naughty electronic stuff makes.

 

[Footman]

I think I'll wait for more reliable reviews on or after the 25th before deciding.

 

[Frick]

http://img.techpowerup.org/131016/Ouch.jpg

You know tpu.org has a resize feature right?

 

[BiggieShady]

If anything, FurMark test shows that card can survive it without throttling which means it will probably overclock generously with a voltage bump

To begin with, the GPU core is clocked at 1050 MHz. There is no dynamic-overclocking feature, but the chip can lower its clocks, taking load and temperatures into account.

Load and temperature is mentioned for dynamic clocks, not power so if there is enough cooling there should be no throttling.
We should know if anyone has these under water clocked to 1.3 GHz, to see how much voltage is needed and if clocks get lowered under load at all ... it will be interesting for sure

 

[Ghost]

There is no doubt that this card is above Titan clock to clock. However, this beast will consume bunch of wattage and that tiny fan is not really reliable. The card is capable at the top, but it is not perfect. Hope that the custom versions will be available soon.

If Titan @ 837 MHz is faster than 290X @ 1000 MHz, would 290X @ 1000 MHz be faster than Titan @ 1000 MHz?

 

[Lionheart]

You know tpu.org has a resize feature right?

Yes I know I just get lazy sometimes...

On another note, when are the actual reviews suppose to come out, is it today, tomorrow or later this month?

 

[RCoon]

http://img.techpowerup.org/131016/e78.jpg

Yes I know I just get lazy sometimes...

On another note, when are the actual reviews suppose to come out, is it today, tomorrow or later this month?

When NDA lifts, which isnt until the end of October, but we don't know what date specifically NOBODY DOES

 

[buildzoid]

If Titan @ 837 MHz is faster than 290X @ 1000 MHz, would 290X @ 1000 MHz be faster than Titan @ 1000 MHz?

All titan benchmarks are run a 993 to 1006mhz because of Nvidia's boost 2.0 so it's basically a clock to clock comparison.

 

[Blín D'ñero]

http://img.techpowerup.org/131016/e78.jpg

Yes I know I just get lazy sometimes...

On another note, when are the actual reviews suppose to come out, is it today, tomorrow or later this month?

Well, the 24th of October, as i posted last night here and here (and nobody reacted ): that is what the Chinese reviewer said.

 

[sweet]

If Titan @ 837 MHz is faster than 290X @ 1000 MHz, would 290X @ 1000 MHz be faster than Titan @ 1000 MHz?

Another victim of the scheme pulled by nVidia's dynamic boost

 

[Prima.Vera]

Well, the 24th of October, as i posted last night here and here (and nobody reacted ): that is what the Chinese reviewer said.

never understand why are they taking so long...

 

[Aithos]

It is wonderful to see such a competitive product has great potential that I'd also will be much cheaper than NVIDIA products wich behaves like a pig with the young to thecustomers. If the price variable $ 500-550 ˘ seriously considering buying at least three or four R9-290X .

Because R9-290X has reasonable price and wery good preformance it will bee other highly desirable blow between nVidia legs for manipulation with the price and products.
nVidia did not develop anything new and sale of old technology with a new label .
If customers are paying such a high price you would expect at least 200% the best product in the next year given that it should be paid for the development of new technologies.we all know that k104 did not get improvements as would normally be expected and sold throughout the year as Kepler's best for 500$ while holding in reserve k100 with a bunch of excuses.And when it was year around presented TITAN with the more abnormal price.Unfortunately, I only have two kidneys and would not cover SLI (2xTITAN) price !
I hope at a reasonable price and good preformance good slap in the face too nVidia

You do realize that almost the entire lineup of new AMD cards are rebadges from old cards right? This card will also not retail for $500-550, I'm betting it will be $650-700 instead. Then Nvidia will drop their 780 price to $550-600 and claim the same performance for less money (which is their previous MO). Keep in mind these are based on reference clock, the Nvidia is an aggressive overclocker AND the 800 series which is the real competition for this card will be out Q1 2014. The 780 has been out for quite some time already and is barely lower performance in any of these benchmarks.

Even if the 290x ends up being a bigger performance jump than they show here, it is unlikely anyone with a 780 will "upgrade" and if the 780 drops in price most people will go for the better performance/dollar ratio. AMD is looking rather lackluster if you ask me.

 

[Blín D'ñero]

[...] An out-of-place fourth member of the comparison is the $299 Radeon R9 280X. [...]

It's not out of place at all. Because it shows how strong even this card (R9 280X, the old 7970GE) is for relatively so little money (300 bucks or less).
I have been crossfiring 7970 (@1100/1575) the past 1¾ years, getting performance far exceeding the results in these charts by R9 290X, Titan, 780..., for instance Crysis 3 Ultra runs a steady 60 fps vsync on my 2560x1600 screen; there isn't a game that doesn't run smooth as butter with these.
To those with a 7970 and a crossfire capable motherboard and no 600~650 bucks to upgrade i'd suggest to pair it with a second one or with a 280X and be done with this whole "new cards" rage. Getting the best result for the least cash.

 

[Aithos]

Another victim of the scheme pulled by nVidia's dynamic boost

Another person who doesn't understand how overclocking with current nVidia cards works. When you overclock the base clock you also overclock the dynamic boost. So if it runs at say 900hz (1000hz boost) when you overclock to 1000hz you end up with say 1050hz boost. Both numbers go up. If the 290x can't beat the reference Titan it would be even lower than the overclocked Titan.

Same goes for the 780 which can easily match a Titan OCed. If the power numbers end up being an accurate reflection then even if the 290x is a serious OCing card it won't be worth the minor performance gain. If it is subpar for overclocking the 780 will beat it flat out and AMD will be in trouble if nVidia drops their prices as expected.

Keep in mind nVidia also has another generation of cards coming out Q1 2014, if AMD can't beat the current cards effectively that's not a good sign.

 

[Am*]

Seriously impressive results, especially for a card with early beta drivers beating Titan in its own game (Metro LL). If we take future driver updates into account as well as Mantle, this card has some serious potential.

Power consumption figures don't mean jackshit on Nvidia's side and even if they were fair (which they aren't), I'll happily take a card that's cheaper and performs at its full potential that takes a few more watts at load than a gimped piece of crap like the Titan which is throttled & broken out of the factory and with almost no OC potential thanks to shitty power delivery circuitry and no custom PCB designs. Nvidia better halve the price of the Titan & drop the rest of their cards' prices (GTX 780 & 770 by at least 30%-40%) and come up with a $600 successor consisting of a fully enabled GK110 core, fast, or they can piss off out of the GPU race permanently this year and prepare for lots more doom and gloom analyst predictions and shitty Q4 results (and we can prepare for lots of butthurt statements from Nvidia execs for why they failed -- "because we didn't even try"..."we let AMD have the market this year"..."wait for Maxwell"...etc etc).

 

[RCoon]

Seriously impressive results, especially for a card with early beta drivers. If we take future driver updates into account as well as Mantle, this card has some serious potential. Power consumption figures don't mean jackshit on Nvidia's side and even if they were fair (which they aren't), I'll happily take a card that's cheaper and performs at its full potential than a gimped piece of crap like the Titan which is throttled & broken out of the factory and with almost no OC potential thanks to shitty power delivery circuitry. Nvidia better halve the price of the Titan and come up with a $600 successor with a fully enabled GK110 core fast, or they can piss off and prepare for lots of doom and gloom analyst predictions and shitty Q4 results.

I'm not sure you're experienced in anything to do with the Titan, or how it overclocks, so that conjecture you're making is a little, well, wrong. I want Titan to be thrashed as much as you do, because the price is retarded, but the Titan does OC, and it OC's very well in the right hands. Also the fact that in the steam survey, NVidia cards took the highest share of video cards in systems, should tell you enough about how their Q4 results will turn out.
This is yet another dubious leak, so it should be taken with a pile of salt and then some.
Also Mantle means nothing at this point. Better FPS in BF4 and that's it. No other games are confirmed to use Mantle, so for now Mantle can be completely ignored when it comes to possible benchmarking figures. Until somebody confirms they're using Mantle to port a game to PC, anyone claiming Mantle will make AMD dominate PC game benchmarks is entirely misdirected to the Nth degree.

 

[Am*]

I'm not sure you're experienced in anything to do with the Titan, or how it overclocks, so that conjecture you're making is a little, well, wrong. I want Titan to be thrashed as much as you do, because the price is retarded, but the Titan does OC, and it OC's very well in the right hands. Also the fact that in the steam survey, NVidia cards took the highest share of video cards in systems, should tell you enough about how their Q4 results will turn out.
This is yet another dubious leak, so it should be taken with a pile of salt and then some.
Also Mantle means nothing at this point. Better FPS in BF4 and that's it. No other games are confirmed to use Mantle, so for now Mantle can be completely ignored when it comes to possible benchmarking figures. Until somebody confirms they're using Mantle to port a game to PC, anyone claiming Mantle will make AMD dominate PC game benchmarks is entirely misdirected to the Nth degree.

I don't need "experience" of any sort to know that a GPU is broken and gimped out of the factory -- I've read plenty of complaints both here and on GPU vendor forums to know that it has serious throttling issues and needed to be BIOS flashed in order to even work properly or ALLOW the GPU to sustain a decent overclock and that was from people who spent $3000+ grand on their GPU setups and water cooling alone. And I have a friend that owned one and returned it for the exact same reason. Prior to doing my fair bit of research, I had plans to move up to the Titan from my GTX 660 just before reviews for it came out. I ended up disregarding the Titan and returning my GTX 660 for similar reasons (throttling/unstable clocks, and a flatout nonsensical TDP, which was exceeded in several games under normal gameplay load), except the stupendous $1000 price tag of the Titan, which I was ready to fork out because I even had the cash set aside, had it been as good as promised by Nvidia.

And Mantle has direct ties with AMD's consoles, all of which run on AMD GCN GPUs -- regardless of how effective it will be, it is of more value to the average user than all of Nvidia's bullshit gimmicky features combined, including PhysX and the rest of the proprietary garbage they run. Since Mantle promises to make porting to the PC easier, it has a far brighter future ahead of it than anything Nvidia has to date.

And BTW, the GPU market share on Steam includes a crapton of old GPU users like me, who are running Nvidia's golden age cards like Fermi and G92, who will at some point be looking to upgrade. Fact is AMD is taking more market share from Nvidia and faster than it ever has before and lots of people with money to spare, like me, will switch to AMD without a second thought if the performance is there. The only reason I am holding off pre-ordering a R290X right now is because A. I have a 3D Vision 2 monitor, which I wish AMD supported as well as Nvidia, but they don't, and B. My nearly 4 year old, VRAM starved GTX 460 still manages to run BF4 beta at a half decent framerate. The minute it dies or I find something tempting enough to upgrade to, I will.

Oh and BF4, just like BF3 and BFBC2 before it, will be the main, if not the only reason I will upgrade, so I don't need to "wait and see" to know how Mantle will turn out. BF4 will be the deciding factor in my purchase, so if Dice say "Mantle makes a 290X mop the floor with the Titan" or "gives it an advantage over equivalent or overpriced Nvidia cards", it is already of more worth to me than anything Nvidia can promise.

 

[Recus]

I don't need "experience" of any sort to know that a GPU is broken and gimped out of the factory -- I've read plenty of complaints both here and on GPU vendor forums to know that it has serious throttling issues and needed to be BIOS flashed in order to even work properly or ALLOW the GPU to sustain a decent overclock and that was from people who spent $3000+ grand on their GPU setups and water cooling alone. And I have a friend that owned one and returned it for the exact same reason. Prior to doing my fair bit of research, I had plans to move up to the Titan from my GTX 660 just before reviews for it came out. I ended up disregarding the Titan and returning my GTX 660 for similar reasons (throttling/unstable clocks, and a flatout nonsensical TDP, which was exceeded in several games under normal gameplay load), except the stupendous $1000 price tag of the Titan, which I was ready to fork out because I even had the cash set aside, had it been as good as promised by Nvidia.

And Mantle has direct ties with AMD's consoles, all of which run on AMD GCN GPUs -- regardless of how effective it will be, it is of more value to the average user than all of Nvidia's bullshit gimmicky features combined, including PhysX and the rest of the proprietary garbage they run. Since Mantle promises to make porting to the PC easier, it has a far brighter future ahead of it than anything Nvidia has to date.

And BTW, the GPU market share on Steam includes a crapton of old GPU users like me, who are running Nvidia's golden age cards like Fermi and G92, who will at some point be looking to upgrade. Fact is AMD is taking more market share from Nvidia and faster than it ever has before and lots of people with money to spare, like me, will switch to AMD without a second thought if the performance is there. The only reason I am holding off pre-ordering a R290X right now is because A. I have a 3D Vision 2 monitor, which I wish AMD supported as well as Nvidia, but they don't, and B. My nearly 4 year old, VRAM starved GTX 460 still manages to run BF4 beta at a half decent framerate. The minute it dies or I find something tempting enough to upgrade to, I will.

Oh and BF4, just like BF3 and BFBC2 before it, will be the main, if not the only reason I will upgrade, so I don't need to "wait and see" to know how Mantle will turn out. BF4 will be the deciding factor in my purchase, so if Dice say "Mantle makes a 290X mop the floor with the Titan" or "gives it an advantage over equivalent or overpriced Nvidia cards", it is already of more worth to me than anything Nvidia can promise.

Depression caused by huge power consumption and heat of R9 290.

 

[ensabrenoir]

Here we go!

...amd would never deceive us...

....wow how late did this post show up..

 

[dom99]

Well, the 24th of October, as i posted last night here and here (and nobody reacted ): that is what the Chinese reviewer said.

I think its the 25th...

Source http://sites.amd.com/us/Documents/AMD_Radeon_290X_Battlefield4_Limited_Ed.pdf

 

[the54thvoid]

I don't need "experience" of any sort to know that a GPU is broken and gimped out of the factory -- I've read plenty of complaints both here and on GPU vendor forums to know that it has serious throttling issues and needed to be BIOS flashed in order to even work properly or ALLOW the GPU to sustain a decent overclock and that was from people who spent $3000+ grand on their GPU setups and water cooling alone.

I have read (up to this morning at least) every page of the GTX Titan owners thread at OCN. Everybody accepts that the Titan is hamstrung by BIOS limits but even without that, if temps are controlled it hits about 1097-1137MHz before throttling. FTR, a Titan at 1137MHz is f*cking fast.

so if Dice say "Mantle makes a 290X mop the floor with the Titan" or "gives it an advantage over equivalent or overpriced Nvidia cards", it is already of more worth to me than anything Nvidia can promise.

And I couldn't agree more with you. If you want massive frame rates on BF4 at 1440p res or higher, it looks like 290X IS the way forward. But bear in mind my 1136MHz Titan averages 60fps at Ultra settings (at 1440p). I'm quite sure it will get blown away come Mantle time but let's not dismiss what is a sound card and has been since February.