Value and Conclusion

Priced just 10 percent higher than a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card, AMD's Radeon R9 290X CrossFire is an interesting high-end graphics option if you're willing to overlook a few things. At 2560x1600 and in its "Uber" mode, the R9 290X CrossFire offers 30% higher performance than the GTX TITAN and 26% higher performance than the GTX 690, a dual-GPU graphics cards priced around the $1000 mark. So the R9 290X "Uber" CrossFire configuration is a great deal from a price-performance perspective. Please note that we are discussing 2560x1600 here because it is the absolute minimum resolution you should use for 290X CrossFire. Serious CF performance scaling only happens at that resolution and beyond.

However, things aren't that great from a pure-performance perspective. The overall performance upscale over a single R9 290X "Uber" is 47% at 2560x1600. On the upside, though, more games are taking advantage of CrossFire than we're used to seeing, thanks to AMD's improved developer relations. There are also fewer tests with zero upscaling. But not every game supports 5760x1080 (triple-monitor Eyefinity or 3DVision Surround) numbers, so the tests that do run it don't contribute towards the performance summary. Hence, we must point out that both R9 290X CrossFire setups scale excellently with Eyefinity. Both "Quiet" and "Uber" CrossFire setups are consistently above the 50 percent mark over the single R9 290X "Quiet" and even crack close to 90 percent in some games.

Yet it's tough to recommend R9 290X CrossFire because it's anything but quiet. No matter whether you use the "Quiet" or "Uber" BIOS, they're both unbearably loud when properly loaded and not recommendable for setups in which you rely on speakers, no matter how punchy they are. Their noise output can even potentially affect your gameplay in online multi-player games where you can hear out your enemies. We'd strictly recommend a gaming headset with good noise isolation, preferably active noise cancellation.

Also, you must absolutely have one free slot between both cards, otherwise the top card will not get enough fresh air, which causes it to run too hot, meaning that clocks have to be dropped down very far.

So, should you pick a pair of R9 290Xs over a single GTX TITAN by shelling out $100 more? Only if you're willing to put up with a lot more noise, heat, and power-draw for 30% more performance, which does show potential to widen at EyeFinity resolutions. Watercooling could solve the noise issues, and benchmark enthusiasts with LN2 on tap could see things a whole lot differently.