Amd Volcanic Islands details

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Originally Posted by Olivon

I'm not fanatic at all.
I did buy an HD 7970 card in response of Titan launch.
I' m a long time ATI/AMD/Intel/nVidia user. Changing camp is no problem for me.

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I don't think your biased at all Olivon, the people calling you biased have more than a tinge of red in their lenses.

Your one of the few people that are completely unbiased at all on this board. Its one of the reason's why you have more thanks than pretty much more thanks than everyone besides SKYMTL and that's with a relatively low post count.

This launch has brought a out the worst in people. Enough that the board has made 2 new moderators.

Some of its a result of insecurity in Nvidia fan but some it a result of people like flopper and Piledriver(thankfully he was banned), coming out the woodwork to troll.

I think we generally all need to accept two things and it brings balance to everything. 290x performs like a titan and in certain situations better. It also costs $550 and has brought competition to the landscape and made things way better for pricing for both sides. People are grateful for this or should be as Nvidia was pricing and handling their cards like an ass recently. Nvidia ridiculous pricing and subsequent price drops, just showed us how overpriced they were in the first place. The arrogance Nvidia has played by putting such stupid voltage regulation really pisses me off. On such an expensive card, I want to be able to tweak it without making getting a modified bios mandatory.

Nonetheless, the 290x it isn't a products without its warts, people made way more fun of fermi when it came out even though it was the unequivocally the fastest card, more so than the 290x is. It makes sense that AMD is getting the same criticism. Even with the Fermi launch, there wasn't as much criticism with the cooler(besides the look of it), that even AMD fans want the 290x cooler replaced. The fact that it starts out quite a bit quicker than a gtx 780 only to end up the same speed or a little bit behind it when both are overclocked shows AMD fubarbed something. To have to spend 80 dollar(on a air cooler) to 125+ for a water block is not a reasonable compromise when AMD could have charged 20 bucks more for the cards and put a better cooler on it. Particular because its hard to get aftermarket blower-style fan heat sink.

People just need to accept both sides of the coin and not just one side or the other. Then maybe just some of this hostile attitude in general can stop.

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Originally Posted by Olivon

Here in France, 780 custom OC model (1059MHz GPU + 3 games) cost less than a 290X which is not available anyway.

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then stop comparing only one country, espseical in the EU... :p:

Cheapest 1000+mhz 780 is for ~450€, cheapest 290x is ~470€ (and thats with all the limited availability) mid November prices will be much more interesting on both sides.

Buying now is a stupid thing to do.

290X is a great card on all fronts. It only dissapoints in regaurds to reference cooling. In a few weeks when custom cards release it will be a non-issue though. It is wise not to make conclusions based on the choice of cooling used.

Also worth considering, in regards to nvidias temp and noise. Nvidia includes a decent cooling solution on their high-end cards. If they would of stuck with a cheaper heatsink their thermal performance may actually be closer to say 290X. It isn't a true apples to apples comparison. It would be interesting to see 780ti vs 290x with the exact same cooler used. That would be a much better comparison of the actual silicon vs heatsink used.

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Originally Posted by tajoh111

Even with the Fermi launch, there wasn't as much criticism with the cooler(besides the look of it), that even AMD fans want the 290x cooler replaced.

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Fermi was still hot even with that massive reference cooler. The stock 480 cooler had heatpipes, and was beefy overall. OTOH 290x reference cooler is pretty much the same cooler that is on my 5850 reference.

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Originally Posted by tajoh111

I don't think your biased at all Olivon, the people calling you biased have more than a tinge of red in their lenses.

Your one of the few people that are completely unbiased at all on this board. Its one of the reason's why you have more thanks than pretty much more thanks than everyone besides SKYMTL and that's with a relatively low post count.

This launch has brought a out the worst in people. Enough that the board has made 2 new moderators.

Some of its a result of insecurity in Nvidia fan but some it a result of people like flopper and Piledriver(thankfully he was banned), coming out the woodwork to troll.

I think we generally all need to accept two things and it brings balance to everything. 290x performs like a titan and in certain situations better. It also costs $550 and has brought competition to the landscape and made things way better for pricing for both sides. People are grateful for this or should be as Nvidia was pricing and handling their cards like an ass recently. Nvidia ridiculous pricing and subsequent price drops, just showed us how overpriced they were in the first place. The arrogance Nvidia has played by putting such stupid voltage regulation really pisses me off. On such an expensive card, I want to be able to tweak it without making getting a modified bios mandatory.

Nonetheless, the 290x it isn't a products without its warts, people made way more fun of fermi when it came out even though it was the unequivocally the fastest card, more so than the 290x is. It makes sense that AMD is getting the same criticism. Even with the Fermi launch, there wasn't as much criticism with the cooler(besides the look of it), that even AMD fans want the 290x cooler replaced. The fact that it starts out quite a bit quicker than a gtx 780 only to end up the same speed or a little bit behind it when both are overclocked shows AMD fubarbed something. To have to spend 80 dollar(on a air cooler) to 125+ for a water block is not a reasonable compromise when AMD could have charged 20 bucks more for the cards and put a better cooler on it. Particular because its hard to get aftermarket blower-style fan heat sink.

People just need to accept both sides of the coin and not just one side or the other. Then maybe just some of this hostile attitude in general can stop.

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true but it was the higher priced card at the time to
I don't think as many would have made fun of the 480 if it came out 100 bucks cheaper than the 5870 at the time

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Originally Posted by bill_d

true but it was the higher priced card at the time to
I don't think as many would have made fun of the 480 if it came out 100 bucks cheaper than the 5870 at the time

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True, but 5870 was way way better priced at $379 vs the $650 and up GK110. There were rumors that at $499, nvidia wasn't making money on gtx 480 because of the piss yields. 290x value isn't that pretty compared to anything under gk110.

As long as AMD followed traditional pricing rather than a price fixing/monopoly price model, it was going to be vastly cheaper than Nvidia.

If Nvidia didn't go so gonzo on pricing in the first place, something like 649 for titan and 499 or 550 for gtx 780 which should be the 770, 290x value wouldn't look so good.

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Originally Posted by Hornet331

then stop comparing only one country, espseical in the EU... :p:

Cheapest 1000+mhz 780 is for ~450?, cheapest 290x is ~470? (and thats with all the limited availability) mid November prices will be much more interesting on both sides.

Buying now is a stupid thing to do.

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290 and 780Ti are not out. Better is to wait when prices will be stabilize a little bit.
Wait to see what AMD partners can do with the Hawaii chip seems a good idea too.

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Originally Posted by tajoh111

True, but 5870 was way way better priced at $379 vs the $650 and up GK110. There were rumors that at $499, nvidia wasn't making money on gtx 480 because of the piss yields. 290x value isn't that pretty compared to anything under gk110.

As long as AMD followed traditional pricing rather than a price fixing/monopoly price model, it was going to be vastly cheaper than Nvidia.

If Nvidia didn't go so gonzo on pricing in the first place, something like 649 for titan and 499 or 550 for gtx 780 which should be the 770, 290x value wouldn't look so good.

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they went gonzo when they sold what was to be a 660 as the 680

and I seem to remember a interview of their ceo around the 8800 ultra and him saying the next cards would be 1000 bucks snd wanting to be like the Ferrari of gpu's

nv has been gonzo for a long time

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Originally Posted by bill_d

they went gonzo when they sold what was to be a 660 as the 680

and I seem to remember a interview of their ceo around the 8800 ultra and him saying the next cards would be 1000 bucks snd wanting to be like the Ferrari of gpu's

nv has been gonzo for a long time

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And this is exactly why we need AMD do to well. The only reason the 8800gtx was milked so badly for years was because the HD 2900 xt epic failed performance wise and came a year too late.

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Originally Posted by Olivon

290 and 780Ti are not out. Better is to wait when prices will be stabilize a little bit.
Wait to see what AMD partners can do with the Hawaii chip seems a good idea too.

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yeah will be interesting to see how this to cards will influence the prices in the future. Especial the 290, if it is really so close the the 290X it will give the 780 a run for its money. Even with the current price cut.

$450 Pricing Looking Increasingly Likely for Radeon R9 290

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MSRP (before taxes) pricing of AMD's upcoming Radeon R9 290 (non-X) being around $450 is looking increasingly likely. In a string of reports that Japanese publication Hermitage Akihabara published ahead of launches of the R9 290X and the R9 290, in which the publication talked about pricing in the country, a price difference of roughly 18 percent is emerging between the two. Applying that to the $549.99 MSRP of the R9 290X stateside, one can derive a $450 pricing for the R9 290. Granted, local taxation may greatly vary between Japan and other markets, affecting the end-user price, but pre-tax MSRPs can be consistent.

The Radeon R9 290 is expected to launch on the 5th of November, 2013. Based on the same "Hawaii" silicon as the Radeon R9 290X, it features 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. Its core is clocked around 948 MHz, and memory at 5.00 GHz.

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the fact that vanilla 290 has been delayed is the biggest proof that it's very close to the 290x

The new drivers should also benefit the R9 290x, my wild guess is 5 to 10% difference depending on the resolution. Provided I'm anywhere close with my speculation (based on rumors) the 290 is going to be very competitive with the GTX 780 in performance for less money.

When did new drivers increase performance by that much across a large variety of games (not just contemporary "benchmark games")? The last time that happened, was with the 12.11 Catalyst drivers, and those mainly looked so good because of a few major performance increases. Yet the majority of titles was largely unaffected. I should also add that most comparisons back then were made not between 12.11 and 12.10 but 12.9 or 12.8 - which means a single driver "step" like 13.11 to 13.12 won't necessarily bring the same performance increase as observed in many of the 12.11 reviews.

Well what is that much, we don't know what the performance of R9 290 was before the new drivers.

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Originally Posted by boxleitnerb

When did new drivers increase performance by that much across a large variety of games (not just contemporary "benchmark games")? The last time that happened, was with the 12.11 Catalyst drivers, and those mainly looked so good because of a few major performance increases. Yet the majority of titles was largely unaffected. I should also add that most comparisons back then were made not between 12.11 and 12.10 but 12.9 or 12.8 - which means a single driver "step" like 13.11 to 13.12 won't necessarily bring the same performance increase as observed in many of the 12.11 reviews.

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I just downloaded and installed 13.8 beta8 and my 3dmark 11 score on my 7990 went from 19600 to 21600 something...

i think you mean 13.11 beta8. and yes although i didn't test it scientificly, i feel that it made a good performance increase.

$450 seems too much for the 290 if the 290X is $500, I assume it wont be much more than 5-10% slower, but the gap from $300-450 from the 280X to the 290 is just large of a market gap in my opinion.

280x seems to be extremely good value and performance. I can pick one up here for GBP 215!

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Originally Posted by Tim

280x seems to be extremely good value and performance. I can pick one up here for GBP 215!

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In Canada, I feel like they are almost giving them away. I have seen them as cheap as 240 dollars which is amazing for a chip that used to cost 580 in Canada when it was launched. At that price, it could very well be the best card this generation when we consider price and performance.

Seems like left over stock of 7970 have killed the price because they were under 300 when the 280x was released and came with games. I don't know AMD can't make their money back and make a profit with such rock bottom prices.

If they are still making money, I wished they were included in consoles because that type of price range is within the realm of a console chip. I wonder if it would have been too big for the APU design.

I am getting worried for consoles next generation already. Call of duty Ghost for xbox one is up-scaled 720p which is downright shameful. Supposedly 5x the power of last gen and they are still running last generation stuff.

Indeed, quite shocking. But it will mean that our hardware will last much longer, and the lowest common denominator gets a huge boost as well.

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I just downloaded and installed 13.8 beta8 and my 3dmark 11 score on my 7990 went from 19600 to 21600 something...

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This driver is good, but in BF4 game my HD 7990 have big drooping in Performance .earlier i was use 13.10 beta2 and the Performance was very good but there was a problem in crashing bug.

13.10 beta2: Performance was very good with BF4:up: + crashing bug:mad:
13.11 beta8: big drooping in Performance with BF4:mad: + fix crashing bug:up:

It seems that AMD can't fix the two thing together.

Official 290 price in Europe : 349 euros

Coming directly from Sapphire.

http://www.comptoir-hardware.com/act...mmediate-.html

Great price ! As expected, 290 seems to be a really good perfs/$ card !

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Originally Posted by Olivon

Official 290 price in Europe : 349 euros

Coming directly from Sapphire.

http://www.comptoir-hardware.com/act...mmediate-.html

Great price ! As expected, 290 seems to be a really good perfs/$ card !

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That is an awesome price. Way better than I thought. Doesn't 350 euros = 400 USD usually for state side prices. That is kind of nuts. AMD is going to disrupt prices basically every where. The 280x is gonna fall in price and so is anything 499 and up.

There definitely going to be some have an effect on AMD's own 290x.

Is that price with or without VAT?

With VAT.

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Originally Posted by boxleitnerb

When did new drivers increase performance by that much across a large variety of games (not just contemporary "benchmark games")? The last time that happened, was with the 12.11 Catalyst drivers, and those mainly looked so good because of a few major performance increases. Yet the majority of titles was largely unaffected. I should also add that most comparisons back then were made not between 12.11 and 12.10 but 12.9 or 12.8 - which means a single driver "step" like 13.11 to 13.12 won't necessarily bring the same performance increase as observed in many of the 12.11 reviews.

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Pretty much at the start of every generation that wasn't a rehash.