AMD Radeon R9 290X 4 GB

[Frick]

Price /performance vs Titan, I'm impressed.
Price /performance vs a couple of used 680s(or 670s) in SLI? Not impressed at all.

I said some time ago that Fermi's power/voltage architecture and it's boost system, make it an extremely friendly and easy product to manage as well as tweak.

Combined with the 98% scale-ability of SLI among other amenities, there's just no good reason to fork over even more money for a new single card that's slower and produces no extenuating bonuses.

I'm glad that AMD has come to market with something competitive, but they took too long to produce something that's going to be trumped in half a year.

So all in all, a normal release.

 

[newconroer]

So all in all, a normal release.

It deserves more than "normal" because it has accomplished the (I assume) goal of taking a the dominant single card solution away from the Titan at an impressive price difference.

The real argument is that like Qubit mentioned, the R290 is not a well rounded product. What it gains in price/performance it loses in heat and power consumption, among having shocking release drivers and nothing miscellaneously beneficial such as Crossfire working in windowed mode or a particular easy clocking interface. Effectively it's guilty of what older GTX cards were.


The problem AMD have created for themselves is that by chasing the crown, they've forgotten that the 290 is completely ineffective to the market for anything but 1600p resolution or higher. 1080p and down can be handled by a single Fermi or AMD 7 series without hassle.
Which is why I harped on about Fermi (and Radeon 7XXX cards to some degree). As an overall product it is significantly better and lest costly. Put two together and you've just eradicated the need for a 290x.

 

[broken pixel]

Go check out the R290x owners club forum over @ OCN for a more civil discussion from people who actually own this GPU.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Go check out the R290x owners club forum over @ OCN for a more civil discussion from people who actually own this GPU.

Read this, is spookily similar:

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=117929

 

[Solaris17]

I dont really see the massive problem with the cooler either. I mean i will finally jump nvidias ship and grab a 290X when I eventually have the money. The problem seems to be that everyone is trying to push moors law thermal output you cant have more powerful and less hot you can argue that you can I suppose but I will dismiss it. This happened with the 2xx series (remember dual monitor temps idle at 60C?) and the highend 4xx series. This is a completely new architecture. This is not a revision. This is a completely new card. I assume next generation or maybe even the next few revisions be it AMD mandate or board partner will use diffirent components to bring the thermals down. (maybe) but for a card of such power I really do not see the problem with the temperatures it may heat up your room it might get loud it may even scare you a little bit. but this is not new for a release flag ship. (GX2 anyone?)

 

[HTC]

as it happens, all I need to do with my gpu is set the fan to 70percent(it will then run up to but not above, not stick at 70%).

with everything else stock, the card runs valley windowed with gpu-z open and never throttles... but that's only at 1000mhz.

when I run 11111mhz+ with the fan at max 70% you can see the card throttling but it never goes lower than 1000mhz when overclocked...or at least not that ive noticed. when left at 1000mhz it did throttle down to 850mhz at one point...

I also set the highest temp for the gpu to run at 80% not 95%...

I don't like anything in my machine running at 95%...

That's not what i was interest in knowing: probably difficult if not impossible to test


I'll try another approach to see if i can explain it better:

1 - take any benchmark you like that's able to push the card so that it throttles a lot @ stock settings (everything, fan included) and try and get the average speed of it throughout the test
2 - set the default speed of the card to the value you discovered in point #1
3 - the card will now throttle way less and, in theory, it should produce the same result as with everything @ stock

If throttling lots of times makes it slower then throttling a few times in the above scenario, then the fact it throttles too much due to the shoddy cooler is actually hampering performance: that's what i want to know.


I know what i want to say but have difficulty putting it to words, sometimes

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I dont really see the massive problem with the cooler either. I mean i will finally jump nvidias ship and grab a 290X when I eventually have the money. The problem seems to be that everyone is trying to push moors law thermal output you cant have more powerful and less hot you can argue that you can I suppose but I will dismiss it. This happened with the 2xx series (remember dual monitor temps idle at 60C?) and the highend 4xx series. This is a completely new architecture. This is not a revision. This is a completely new card. I assume next generation or maybe even the next few revisions be it AMD mandate or board partner will use diffirent components to bring the thermals down. (maybe) but for a card of such power I really do not see the problem with the temperatures it may heat up your room it might get loud it may even scare you a little bit. but this is not new for a release flag ship. (GX2 anyone?)

I think its quite clear that Amd have a very good chip here like Gk110 for Nv that would scale Very well with a node drop , I think like tahiti this is going to run and run and they will have quite a beast for a bit.
Im very glad nvidia released the Gk110 its spurred some effort

 

[erocker]

I'm wondering if and if so, when there will be AIB designs? I wouldn't mind something with an "upgraded PCB/components" and preferably something from EK like they did for the Cu II series.

 

[HumanSmoke]

I'm wondering if and if so, when there will be AIB designs? I wouldn't mind something with an "upgraded PCB/components" and preferably something from EK like they did for the Cu II series.

From a SweClockers article a couple of days ago (Sorry, this is a direct Google Translate so excuse the grammatical spaghetti)

Sources SweClockers now state that AMD has not yet begun deliveries of Hawaii XT graphics processor to partner manufacturers. This means that it will take at least six weeks before the first bespoke models show up in the trade. This is also confirmed by AMD, which expects that these arrive by the end of the fourth quarter.

-----------------------------

In reality.... only time will tell with the 290X, in it's present reference form you could argue that it is far from perfection, lets check back in 3 months and see how opinion is divided then.

Three months??? In three months I predict the prams will be restocked with toys ready to be thrown out again in the Maxwell - Pirate Islands speculation threads. If Nvidia bring out a GTX 780Ti in the next few weeks (and lets face it, with the holiday season in sight, and AMD leaving the door open for Nvidia to go nuts with clocks/power and still compare favourably with the 290X, it is a definite possibility) we're more or less back to the HD 7970 (non-GE)/GTX 680 days- relative parity might be great for the consumer, but it certainly dampens the ardour of forum warriors

 

[MetalRacer]

I'm wondering if and if so, when there will be AIB designs? I wouldn't mind something with an "upgraded PCB/components" and preferably something from EK like they did for the Cu II series.

Asus's product manager confirmed in this interview they are working on a model with the new DirectCU cooler.

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/492...n-tour-2013-asus-new-amd-cards-and-the-future

 

[Xzibit]

Go check out the R290x owners club forum over @ OCN for a more civil discussion from people who actually own this GPU.

Its interesting.

Aside from GPU-Z issues of it influencing GPU to load at 100% and cause some issues for some.

R9 290X @ 1150 Limit
GTX 780 @ 1300 Boost
GTX TITAN @ 1200 Boost
Seams to have similar benchmark numbers

It will be interesting once they get better cooling or put them under water.

 

[sweet]

Is there any Titan/780 that can touch this score?

http://kingpincooling.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2473&page=3

 

[MxPhenom 216]

Is there any Titan/780 that can touch this score?

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/hb92h.jpg

http://kingpincooling.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2473&page=3

Yep. KingPins Titan

 

[N3M3515]

Yep. KingPins Titan

http://hwbot.org/image/1027068.jpg

Wow.........1800 core to score 50 points higher. Talk about clock for clock

Edit: 1800 core on evga precision and 1230 on gpuz?

 

[sweet]

Wow.........1800 core to score 50 points higher. Talk about clock for clock

Edit: 1800 core on evga precision and 1230 on gpuz?

1230 on gpuz shows the base clock, it's not the real time clock. 1800 core on precision shows the boost clock. The card may boost higher through Kepler boost, but maybe not in this case.

 

[wolf]

Is there any Titan/780 that can touch this score?

Yep. KingPins Titan

Must admit I lol'd

I really just want the next generation of Nvidia OR AMD GPU's to come out asap so that this performance level goes down in price.

Because of Nvidias' -intel extreme chip like- pricing, people think $550 is good value for a high end card, and it's not!

$400-450 (350 €) is already a lot to pay for a card and should bring with it a whole butload of performance.

 

[Frick]

Must admit I lol'd

I really just want the next generation of Nvidia OR AMD GPU's to come out asap so that this performance level goes down in price.

Because of Nvidias' -intel extreme chip like- pricing, people think $550 is good value for a high end card, and it's not!

$400-450 (350 €) is already a lot to pay for a card and should bring with it a whole butload of performance.

It's not a price hike. There have been cards in the past that launched at this price. 1$ generally equals €1.

 

[wolf]

When the competition don't have an answer for that level of performance, the company generally charges around the $1000 mark for it (Intel and Nvidia spring to mind), But personally I find $550 to be too much for me to spend on a single card these days.

I just spent 3 years living in France and I definitely payed less euro's than USD for my tech. I think the biggest reason that it evens out (depending on the items, how new they are etc) is that the same item is generally more expensive in France (tax/shipping?) than it is in the states.

Well that was my experience anyway

 

[Frick]

When the competition don't have an answer for that level of performance, the company generally charges around the $1000 mark for it (Intel and Nvidia spring to mind), But personally I find $550 to be too much for me to spend on a single card these days.

I just spent 3 years living in France and I definitely payed less euro's than USD for my tech. I think the biggest reason that it evens out (depending on the items, how new they are etc) is that the same item is generally more expensive in France (tax/shipping?) than it is in the states.

Well that was my experience anyway

Might not be 1$ = 1€ exactly but it's closer to that than to the actual exchange rate.

And as have been said again and again and again, AMD and Intel have both had $1000 parts. The slower GPU's are in different price bracket (the x1950Pro was €200 for instance, now it would have been ... €150 mayhap?) but the high end have at most times been about where we are now. There have been exceptions though.

You might not be willing to pay this, but that is a different topic. Me I wouldn't spend more than €100 on a GPU these days, but that's me.

 

[The Von Matrices]

NVidia just announced price cuts for GTX 780 to $499 effective tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be an official press release later and it will be posted in TPU news.

This basically kills any reason to buy a R9 290X.

 

[Fluffmeister]

NVidia just announced price cuts for GTX 780 to $499 effective tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be an official press release later and it will be posted in TPU news.

This basically kills any reason to buy a R9 290X.

Price drop already in effect at Overclockers.co.uk, some real nice 780's for around £400. Scan.co.uk too.

 

[Mathragh]

Damn Nvidia must also be thinking the AMD HD R9 290X is the superior card if they price it under that one. Even more when you factor in the "superiority factor" that NVidia normally uses to ask a premium for a similar product.

 

[manofthem]

NVidia just announced price cuts for GTX 780 to $499 effective tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be an official press release later and it will be posted in TPU news.

This basically kills any reason to buy a R9 290X.

That does sound exciting... If new 780s drop to $500, I could probably find a used one for $400, and that would be very enticing. a drop of $130+ shows how inflated the price really was.

Still I can see the prices of the 290x settling like 2 months after launch to a nice deal too.

 

[wolf]

So basically with a cooler, quieter card that offer the same or even slightly better price/performance, they will keep a lot of customers.

 

[Tatty_Two]

NVidia just announced price cuts for GTX 780 to $499 effective tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be an official press release later and it will be posted in TPU news.

This basically kills any reason to buy a R9 290X.

But certainly does not kill the reason to buy the 290 non "x" which in my opinion was always going to be the key player at the even lower price.