AMD Radeon R9 290 4 GB

[HTC]

I think the VGA output argument is pretty clear:

If you use VGA for your primary monitor then you're out of luck with the R9 290; however if you really want VGA you can buy a $25 DisplayPort to VGA adapter. But for the naysayers, remember that the 290 has two true dual link DVI ports in exchange for the lack of a VGA port. I'd say that for the number of people using VGA as their primary monitor compared to the number of 2560x1440 monitor users that's a good tradeoff.

If you use a VGA monitor as a second, non-gaming monitor, then you don't need to plug it into the R9 290. Almost every modern processor has integrated graphics. Just plug it into the VGA port of integrated graphics and you have the VGA port for your second monitor.

Dude: it has been explained that even the VGA adapters don't work on 290 because the 290 doesn't have the analog part required for the adapter to work.

Personally, though not considering it a con myself, i understand why it's there: it's because many people when checking reviews tend to go straight to the power consumption and/or performance pages, skipping the card's details, and if this info isn't @ the pros/cons, they never see it.

As for the card: i'm surprised AMD only charges $400 for this kind of performance while i'm disgusted for their choice of cooler. I still maintain that a better cooler (no need for a good one: just not a very bad one) would make this card fly off shelves WAY easier, IMO.

 

[The Von Matrices]

Dude: it has been explained that even the VGA adapters don't work on 290 because the 290 doesn't have the analog part required for the adapter to work.

Don't criticize anyone when you don't know what you're talking about. Displayport is a purely digital interface. This active adapter converts digital Displayport to analog VGA. There is need need for analog outputs on the card itself for this adapter to work. Only passive DVI to VGA adapters do not work.

 

[TheThirdRace]

Dude: it has been explained that even the VGA adapters don't work on 290 because the 290 doesn't have the analog part required for the adapter to work.

Oops yourself... He said you can buy a Display Port to VGA adapter for 25$, not DVI to VGA.

Don't criticize anyone when you don't know what you're talking about. Displayport is a purely digital interface. This active adapter converts digital Displayport to analog VGA. There is need need for analog outputs on the card itself for this adapter to work. Only passive DVI to VGA adapters do not work.

Taken from the page: "The DP-to-VGA adapter uses an integrated chip to provide an active digital to analog conversion".

Doesn't sound like you need analog on the video card to make it happen. Are you 100% sure you're right?

 

[HTC]

Don't criticize anyone when you don't know what you're talking about. Displayport is a purely digital interface. This active adapter converts digital Displayport to analog VGA. There is need need for analog outputs on the card itself for this adapter to work. Only passive DVI to VGA adapters do not work.

Oops yourself... He said you can buy a Display Port to VGA adapter for 25$, not DVI to VGA.

I stand corrected.

Anybody can make mistakes and it seems i just did one.

 

[Casecutter]

$400...! While it spars with a 780, love this competition.

I'm sure AMD was astonished Nvidia went straight-away to the $500 price (I was), but they said fine... we can bring it right to you and still be more profitable. Sure again noise hurts, but if AMD can have AIB's offering customs by end of November they’ll be in a good place.

Even today I wouldn't be against spending some $50-100 on top of the $400 for an aftermarket air, water block, or I'd even love to see one with a simple "Red Mod" (although haven't yet read if/how well that works). If you can maintain it below 94°C and shave off a good amount of dbA, while achieve OC’n like W1zzards' it's definitely worth taking into consideration a reference unit.

The only way Nvidia can strike back in this price point is with a GK110, and perhaps future cut-back part those that can only offer 10 or 11 SP to really retain a revenue return? Obviously they would offset performance with higher clocks, but how that would measure up in terms of perf/watts? I suppose it doesn't matter as long as it stays competitive, AMD gave Nvidia plenty to fall back on in term of "efficiency". That said if Nvidia can't maintain at, or be similar in terms of perf/watt it really won't be a good return volley. Perchance a GK110 cannot be brought to market in viable form without showing the thresholds of that huge Kepler?

 

[the54thvoid]

Good for Titan owners on having a large epeen that says "I have enough money to be the same as everyone else who has enough money to waste, I'm pretentious!"

It's a shame that people like you that can contribute so much to TPU end up resorting to low brow insults. I'm not pretentious by the way, PC hardware is my hobby.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pretentious

pre·ten·tious (pr-tnshs)
adj.
1. Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.
2. Making or marked by an extravagant outward show; ostentatious. See Synonyms at showy.

I bought a Titan to come as close as I could to the performance of my crossfired 7970's (which were hampered by frame pacing in a few major titles i played). It's gets really fucking boring explaining that to people that prefer to jump to childish ill informed insults.

 

[Nihilus]

The only gripe is that amd should of lowered the fan speed and MHz, still have a good value, then showed it off as a monster over clocker when the right coolers were attached. It didn't need to match the GTX 780, only the GTX 770.

 

[Steevo]

$400...! While it spars with a 780, love this competition.

I'm sure AMD was astonished Nvidia went straight-away to the $500 price (I was), but they said fine... we can bring it right to you and still be more profitable. Sure again noise hurts, but if AMD can have AIB's offering customs by end of November they’ll be in a good place.

Even today I wouldn't be against spending some $50-100 on top of the $400 for an aftermarket air, water block, or I'd even love to see one with a simple "Red Mod" (although haven't yet read if/how well that works). If you can maintain it below 94°C and shave off a good amount of dbA, while achieve OC’n like W1zzards' it's definitely worth taking into consideration a reference unit.

The only way Nvidia can strike back in this price point is with a GK110, and perhaps future cut-back part those that can only offer 10 or 11 SP to really retain a revenue return? Obviously they would offset performance with higher clocks, but how that would measure up in terms of perf/watts? I suppose it doesn't matter as long as it stays competitive, AMD gave Nvidia plenty to fall back on in term of "efficiency". That said if Nvidia can't maintain at, or be similar in terms of perf/watt it really won't be a good return volley. Perchance a GK110 cannot be brought to market in viable form without showing the thresholds of that huge Kepler?

It does speak volumes about the efficiency of this GPU die, 28% roughly smaller and just as fast if not a little faster clock for clock.

Most people don't seem to understand that smaller surface of the die poses a huge increase in what it take to keep it cool, the thermal conductivity of copper and even with a vapor chamber on it is at its limit to stay in a reasonable size 2 slot configuration.

I am fairly certain that if we put the cooler from a Titan or 780 on, it would still have the same heat dissipation problem, the W per mm2 is the issue, in conjunction with the thermal Delta, and hysteresis of the thermal load.

The extra power consumption comes from the higher utilization of the shader cores.

It's a shame that people like you that can contribute so much to TPU end up resorting to low brow insults. I'm not pretentious by the way, PC hardware is my hobby.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pretentious

pre·ten·tious (pr-tnshs)
adj.
1. Claiming or demanding a position of distinction or merit, especially when unjustified.
2. Making or marked by an extravagant outward show; ostentatious. See Synonyms at showy.

I bought a Titan to come as close as I could to the performance of my crossfired 7970's (which were hampered by frame pacing in a few major titles i played). It's gets really fucking boring explaining that to people that prefer to jump to childish ill informed insults.

I could approach this from a few different ways.

Its great that you bought a Titan, I'm glad it has performed well for you. I don't mean to be insulting, I hope you have modded it to push the hardware, most of us do. Its what brought me here to TPU, editing BIOS's on cards and pushing the limit. I didn't mean any particular owner or user, just standard crappers.

It irks me and many others when thread crapping happens, not just the occasional jab in good fun, but honest thread crapping. When people that don't own the hardware or just parrot what they read keep reposting the same single instance issues as the absolute truth it becomes annoying and detrimental to the thread and new users looking at the reviews here.

If it bothers someone that AMD is selling a product then don't buy it, post something constructive or one post about how its warmer than you might like. But the horse has been beaten in to burger and already made into lasagna.

So you only read the first three sentences of my argument and made a silly comment based on it? If you're going to do that then my time is wasted on you. My argument was not about buying a product for prestige but how prestigious products hold resale value.

Huh.....sorry?

It's not collector items, its computer hardware. I bought my X1800XT brand new and sold it less than a year later for pennies on the dollar of what I paid for it. Now the GTX480 can be had for $50 or less, roughly 1/10th of what it was new. Not much other than phones depreciate this fast, and the high end depreciate faster.

 

[W1zzard]

Don't criticize anyone when you don't know what you're talking about. Displayport is a purely digital interface. This active adapter converts digital Displayport to analog VGA. There is need need for analog outputs on the card itself for this adapter to work. Only passive DVI to VGA adapters do not work.

Confirmed, this adapter will work to output analog VGA from R9 290 Series.

 

[The Von Matrices]

The only gripe is that amd should of lowered the fan speed and MHz, still have a good value, then showed it off as a monster over clocker when the right coolers were attached. It didn't need to match the GTX 780, only the GTX 770.

You describe exactly what AMD originally intended to do with this card. The only thing that changed at the last minute was fan speed; the rest (clock speed, voltage, shaders) was already set. So the "original" R9 290 would be the massive overclocker; the current R9 290 has its overclocking potential diminished because the throttling has been removed. It's almost as if AMD is admitting that its cooler is horrible and increased the cooling (noise be damned) to match what a custom cooled R9 290 would perform like because it knew it wouldn't be selling the reference card with the stock heatsink for very long.

 

[happita]

I simply could not resist. I found some stock at the egg, Sapphire only atm..

Get em while they're hot!!!!
SAPPHIRE 100362SR Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 Video Ca...

 

[Steevo]

You describe exactly what AMD originally intended to do with this card. The only thing that changed at the last minute was fan speed; the rest (clock speed, voltage, shaders) was already set. So the "original" R9 290 would be the massive overclocker; the current R9 290 has its overclocking potential diminished because the throttling has been removed. It's almost as if AMD is admitting that its cooler is horrible and increased the cooling (noise be damned) to match what a custom cooled R9 290 would perform like because it knew it wouldn't be selling the reference card with the stock heatsink for very long.

AMD recently announced they are going to use Sapphire for all their branded cards anyway, so I am thinking they are moving to a fab-less hardware design company instead of having money tied up in manufacturing.

 

[W1zzard]

AMD recently announced they are going to use Sapphire for all their branded cards anyway, so I am thinking they are moving to a fab-less hardware design company instead of having money tied up in manufacturing.

PCPartner (who own Sapphire) has made ATI/AMD reference boards since like forever. AMD does not have a fab for their GPU production, all AMD GPUs are made at TSMC Taiwan

 

[Casecutter]

It does speak volumes about the efficiency of this GPU die, 28% roughly smaller and just as fast if not a little faster clock for clock.

Most people don't seem to understand that smaller surface of the die poses a huge increase in what it take to keep it cool, the thermal conductivity of copper and even with a vapor chamber on it is at its limit to stay in a reasonable size 2 slot configuration.

I am fairly certain that if we put the cooler from a Titan or 780 on, it would still have the same heat dissipation problem, the W per mm2 is the issue, in conjunction with the thermal Delta, and hysteresis of the thermal load.

The extra power consumption comes from the higher utilization of the shader cores.

Amen… Exactly what I said in the 290X review! AMD took right to the edge in a bunch of ways. They’re packaging a bunch stuff in a small space while retaining a cost effective chip. Once they got working risk production they really started seeing that the computation and parameter layout of the design aren't always going to come in from production. Look at the GK100 it didn't make it in its first spin, it had to revamp to some a degree and it even transitioned GK110.

Bear in mind I don't think AMD other than early hypothesis, ever gave hard considerion to a 28Nm Hawaii chip until perhaps end of 2012. Given they accomplished production in 10 months is huge. Both groups of consumers have to be ecstatic that AMD accomplished what they did, because had they not the enthusiast level would've remain unobtainable to huge amount of consumers.

 

[DarkOCean]

I simply could not resist. I found some stock at the egg, Sapphire only atm..

Get em while they're hot!!!!
SAPPHIRE 100362SR Radeon R9 290 4GB GDDR5 Video Ca...



http://img.techpowerup.org/131105/radeon91.jpg

Gone, only powercolor and xfx (wich is 5% more expensive) in stock atm.

 

[Steevo]

PCPartner (who own Sapphire) has made ATI/AMD reference boards since like forever. AMD does not have a fab for their GPU production, all AMD GPUs are made at TSMC Taiwan

I remember they made the majority of their boards, but haven't they been outsourcing some of it to other vendors as well until recently?

http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-selects-sapphire-2013oct01.aspx

I guess they moved their FirePro line exclusively to Sapphire.

 

[the54thvoid]

I could approach this from a few different ways.

Its great that you bought a Titan, I'm glad it has performed well for you. I don't mean to be insulting, I hope you have modded it to push the hardware, most of us do. Its what brought me here to TPU, editing BIOS's on cards and pushing the limit. I didn't mean any particular owner or user, just standard crappers.

It irks me and many others when thread crapping happens, not just the occasional jab in good fun, but honest thread crapping. When people that don't own the hardware or just parrot what they read keep reposting the same single instance issues as the absolute truth it becomes annoying and detrimental to the thread and new users looking at the reviews here.

If it bothers someone that AMD is selling a product then don't buy it, post something constructive or one post about how its warmer than you might like. But the horse has been beaten in to burger and already made into lasagna.
.

Thanks for taking the time to be constructive with your reply - Genuinely appreciate it. I get just as pissed as you do about thread crapping but sometimes I guess carpet bombing statements hit the wrong targets.

The Hawaii architecture is genuinely impressive. The bloody cooler though as a reference design does blow (too much). Most reviewers agree.

Any other argument such as power and mantle being a closed API, or the usual driver regurgitated shite are used by ignorant folk.

What AMD have done is mostly fantastic and the pricing has forced Nvidia to make changes. This is all good. The only negative for most folk is the noise from the ref design. Custom designs should alleviate that (especially if they allow it to run at about 80 -90 degrees to keep noise down) but for me , it's technically a non issue as I'd put a water block on it regardless.

Thanks again for the reply.

 

[Steevo]

Thanks for taking the time to be constructive with your reply - Genuinely appreciate it. I get just as pissed as you do about thread crapping but sometimes I guess carpet bombing statements hit the wrong targets.

The Hawaii architecture is genuinely impressive. The bloody cooler though as a reference design does blow (too much). Most reviewers agree.

Any other argument such as power and mantle being a closed API, or the usual driver regurgitated shite are used by ignorant folk.

What AMD have done is mostly fantastic and the pricing has forced Nvidia to make changes. This is all good. The only negative for most folk is the noise from the ref design. Custom designs should alleviate that (especially if they allow it to run at about 80 -90 degrees to keep noise down) but for me , it's technically a non issue as I'd put a water block on it regardless.

Thanks again for the reply.

No problem.

I am hoping to get back into more modding this year or next, I have squeezed every ounce of power out of this build and need more on the GPU front, that said I would love to see what a custom designed board with more power to the die and good water cooling could do. Considering its showing less than 1.2v on the core there should be headroom left.

 

[The Von Matrices]

Bear in mind I don't think AMD other than early hypothesis, ever gave hard considerion to a 28Nm Hawaii chip until perhaps end of 2012. Given they accomplished production in 10 months is huge. Both groups of consumers have to be ecstatic that AMD accomplished what they did, because had they not the enthusiast level would've remain unobtainable to huge amount of consumers.

I'm not so sure about your timeline being reasonable. GTX 680 & GK104 were released in March 2012 and shocked AMD with its performance (it shocked NVidia too). Yes, AMD released the 7970 GHz edition to compete, but surely they had to know that NVidia still had GK110 to release and that Tahiti wasn't going to be able to compete with it.

Either AMD recognized this issue and started designing Hawaii in mid 2012 (which means that they had 16+ months to produce the chip) or AMD was complacent and started designing Hawaii in late 2012 as you said. In this latter case I would scold AMD more for being complacent than credit them for designing a chip in such a short time. If it only takes them 10 months to design the Hawaii chip they could have started at the release of the GTX 680 and we would have had the R9 290X by February 2013, which is actually before the release of Titan.

 

[Mathragh]

I'm not so sure about your timeline being reasonable. GTX 680 & GK104 were released in March 2012 and shocked AMD with its performance (it shocked NVidia too). Yes, AMD released the 7970 GHz edition to compete, but surely they had to know that NVidia still had GK110 to release and that Tahiti wasn't going to be able to compete with it.

Either AMD recognized this issue and started designing Hawaii in mid 2012 (which means that they had 16+ months to produce the chip) or AMD was complacent and started designing Hawaii in late 2012 as you said. In this latter case I would scold AMD more for being complacent than credit them for designing a chip in such a short time. If it only takes them 10 months to design the Hawaii chip they could have started at the release of the GTX 680 and we would have had the R9 290X by February 2013, which is actually before the release of Titan.

unless they did just that, but were then aiming for the 20nm node, which at the start of 2013 was decided not to be viable in time. I think this was said over at techreport in the comments of the 290 review without providing actual proof. Your post made me think of it though, and judging by the state of affairs over at TSMC i would regard it as possible atleast, since it would mean that they had to redo quite a bit to adapt this chip for 28nm.

All very much speculation though(which i personally love to indulge in on matters like these

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

You forget that there are still people, like me, who use more than one monitor and have a secondary monitor that only has VGA.

Well I forgot no one , use your old card in pciex 2 and run monitoring on that , my point stands legacy is not always necessary.
Mobos don't often have any proper keyboard port just usb which Does Not work as well sometimes when your trying to F8 windows boot or get into bios but hey I must have missed everyone bitching about that.
Ny monitor cost 70 quid just buy another you just spent 6 -8 times that amount on a gpu.

 

[newtekie1]

Well I forgot no one , use your old card in pciex 2 and run monitoring on that , my point stands legacy is not always necessary.
Mobos don't often have any proper keyboard port just usb which Does Not work as well sometimes when your trying to F8 windows boot or get into bios but hey I must have missed everyone bitching about that.
Ny monitor cost 70 quid just buy another you just spent 6 -8 times that amount on a gpu.

And having to spend any money at all to buy anything extra to retain functionality of every other card is a con. There is no getting around that.

 

[THE_EGG]

I simply could not resist. I found some stock at the egg, Sapphire only atm..

Last time I checked, I don't have any Wish I did though.

Looks like Powercolor, MSi and XFX are now in stock though.

 

[Slomo4shO]

It looks like AMD just caused a price war. I see it now, all R9 cards will be on backorder for 2 months or more because they probably won't be able to meet demand (or willingly NOT meet demand so they can drive the prices on these higher)

You don't increase prices when you are trying to gain market share

 

[qubit]

And having to spend any money at all to buy anything extra to retain functionality of every other card is a con. There is no getting around that.

I really hate to agree with you on anything NT, but I do agree here.

This omission is hardly a dealbreaker and can be worked around with that little $25 active adapter, but still annoying. It's the same situation as when mobo ports got removed over time such as IDE and PCI, for example, preventing your old, but useful, kit from being used. It's the price of progress, I guess.