Just to add on why AMD might need to be tested more thoroughly as its current cards allow for boosting allows for far too much variability. Not saying AMD is cheating, but tomshardware did test two different retail cards. He also had one of the most positive 290x reviews when he put it out. His retails sample was at times 20 percent slower than his press sample. That is the huge difference.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3659-2.html
The card that AMD sent to me is a stallion. Even if you get it nice and hot before running a test, bringing it down off of that 1000 MHz “wishful thinking” spec, it’s still faster than GeForce GTX 780, and oftentimes GeForce GTX Titan. But the Radeon R9 290X I bought from Newegg is a dud. It’ll drop to 727 MHz and stay there…and the reference cooler still can’t cool it fast enough. The result is that it violates its 40% fan speed ceiling as well. The craziness, then, is that my R9 290 press board is typically faster than my R9 290X retail card. In the benchmarks, you’re going to see numbers for all three.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3659-20.html
However, the two retail Radeon R9 290X boards in our lab are both slower than the 290 tested today. They average lower clock rates over time, pushing frame rates down. Clearly there’s something wrong when the derivative card straight from AMD ends up on top of the just-purchased flagships. So who’s to say that retail 290s won’t follow suit, and when we start buying those cards, they prove to underperform GeForce GTX 780? We can only speculate at this point, though anecdotal evidence gleaned from our experience with R9 290X is suggestive.
When cards can vary this much. Far more than what was possible with Nvidia's boosting. Golden sample cards can really really skew a review. With Nvidia your looking at the very max 10%, these cards your looking at up to 20% increase in variability.
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