AMD Radeon R9 290 reviews

[xellsyuh]

@Fudzilla: (...)So it’s good news all around - consumers get a great card for $399, AIBs will have plenty of fun with high margin non-reference designs and everyone’s happy.(...)

AMD gave us a cheap hawaii to play with, and showed the chips true potential using agressive thermal profiles... don't like the custom cooler? Watercool it or let the AIB's do it. For the price tag, it is an exceptional deal.

[Zoran]

Is the 290 and 290X PCB the same?

[vario]

Is the 290 and 290X PCB the same?

It seems its the same.

One thing that im interested in, which no one to my knowledge tested, is undervolting.
This cards overclock nicely on stock voltage, it means they are NOT on their max clocks on these volts,and that means they can be undervolted, probably most of them as voltage is set by the worst chip in the bunch.
Also At 399$ you can buy the card, aftermarket cooler, and still it will be lower than 499$ 780.
And especially awesome card for WC setups.

[vortex240]

It's about price, like i said. But i don't think it's a good way for amd to just play the price card. For a long time normal customers thought of Amd as cheap price, but with worse quality. In Last Years they pushed hard and people are now looking better at them. Going back to just beeing cheap doesn't sound too good for me. Nvidia is having cards priced way too high. I don't wanna support that by buying their card. But Amd is not giving me a card i want to buy, looks like i need to wait.

No offence but wtf are you smoking?

AMD just single highhanded rolled the prices back to normal levels - $650 for a card plus tax is not normal. The reference will be perfect for anyone with water. And as soon as custom cooled version arrive, the noise/temp will be taken care of.


So in short - Please DONT buy one! Leave the stock for the rest of us and go 'invest' in a 780 with a pretty cooler.

[Tha Last Meal]

very nice price, AMD just kill the R9 290X + GTX 780 with this new terminator.

I will wait 290 customs versions. Crappy cooler, no thanks

+1

[Zoran]

I'll wait for the prices to normalize then get a reference one and slap a waterblock of my own on it

[onewingedangel]

AMD just cut the legs out from under their own 290x as it also has the same defecits in terms of power consumption and noise, many would say unnacceptably so, whilst offering marginal performance benefits.

With the reference cooler this loud hardly anyone will be able to use it, so you have to factor in the additional cost of a third party cooler when making a meaningful comparison to the GTX 780 with it's rather good reference blower, or the custom design 780 ghz editions that are coming.

Nvidia still seems like the better balance for me, and it seems a cheap and desperate move from AMD. The performance at the price is extraordinary, but you can't ship a card with that level of noise and consider it acceptable. If people buy this what would stop Nvidia responding with a similar dust buster and these ridiculous noise levels becoming standard?

But really I think AMD expect the reference card to be replaced almost exclusively by custom (or at least semi-custom) designs in short order - to overcome the obvious deficiency in the cooler - but this will likely impact the price.

[Tuvok-LuR-]

wow, it's so hard to pass on such an awesome bangs for the bucks...but that power consumption is really too high for me

[biohead]

The heat output and cooling has sort of negated the differences between the X and non-X. The gap will probably widen with non-reference designs, 3rd party cooling and WC, to unleash each card's true potential. These stock releases don't give people much (if any) incentive to go out and get the X over the non-X. But nonetheless, I think we as consumers are definitely the clear winners here

[hokiealumnus]

Our review: http://www.overclockers.com/amd-r9-2...cs-card-review

It's a solid card, especially at that price. The cooler is annoying, so those of you that need silence should either wait for partners to come out with better coolers on their boards or water cool it. Aside from that, I have no complaints.

[askimo]

Regardless of the 290 drawbacks, thanks AMD for the competition you have provided!!!

I hope to see the same aggressiveness in the CPU business

[tbone8ty]

Any body slap a custom cooler in these yet to test?

Someone's gotta have a twin frozr cooler lying around

[Buckster]

do we expect custom cooled versions of these this side of Christmas ?

[Andi64]

Anybody knows if the mounting holes on the 290/290x PCB measure the same as in the 7950/7970 PCB? Maybe I can install my Corsair H60 on the R9290.

[LightSpeed]

Yeah the 290 honestly surprised me, its not cut down by much at all. Im expecting custom cooled cards to be on par if not slightly faster than 290x quiet mode for around $400. At that price, its a steal. Heres hoping they launch before christmas else ill have to slap on an accelero or something because those noise levels are way too much for my (and most peoples) liking.

[KiSUAN]

Any body slap a custom cooler in these yet to test?

Someone's gotta have a twin frozr cooler lying around

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3659-19.html

[Shapeshifter]

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.

Err no it's not cherry picked samples, if you check out most user reviews with good case cooling around various forums they are all "shockingly" getting numbers that line up with sites reviewing the cards. I guess AMD put golden samples on shelves just when those people ordered eh?

What is probably happening could be a few things.

1. They have dud cards, this happens (probably bought an XFX lol)
2. Card cooler contact is horrid (Who has not gotten a cooler with a bad cooler seating / loose screws) giving poor contact to the core.
3. Way to much thermal grease applied or not enough

What they should do is remove the coolers, clean the thermal grease and reapply it all correctly to rule out the card not getting proper cooling and retest, if the issue is still there see point 1.

http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/1...ers-undersoker

Look at that, a retail board and a "Golden" review sample.

[nossy23]

Well this card REALLY needs a third party cooler, that's for sure. If only AMD had invested a bit more in their cooling solution, because that noise is really not acceptable. Still very good performance/price.

[tajoh111]

Err no it's not cherry picked samples, if you check out most user reviews with good case cooling around various forums they are all "shockingly" getting numbers that line up with sites reviewing the cards. I guess AMD put golden samples on shelves just when those people ordered eh?

What is probably happening could be a few things.

1. They have dud cards, this happens (probably bought an XFX lol)
2. Card cooler contact is horrid (Who has not gotten a cooler with a bad cooler seating / loose screws) giving poor contact to the core.
3. Way to much thermal grease applied or not enough

What they should do is remove the coolers, clean the thermal grease and reapply it all correctly to rule out the card not getting proper cooling and retest, if the issue is still there see point 1.

http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/1...ers-undersoker

Look at that, a retail board and a "Golden" review sample.

They took a semi-overclocked card(which are typically binned cards) and down clocked it. AMD cards that come pre-overclocked in the the first place on a stock cooler have to be somewhat binned to utilize that preoverclock.

Tomshardware had two cards that had worse cards than his press samples. It wasn't just a single card.

[Tim]

This is just insanely good performance for the price, I'm shocked, and I've been through so many generations of cards.

One thing that is holding me back is this whole fan/temp/power malarkey. What the heck happened to just a card that has got maximum performance out of the box? (290x) Quiet/Uber mode physical bios switch, what a load of rubbish. Sorry, I will never put up with that. Aftermarket cooler for sure. Not so worried about the temp or the wattage but that reference cooler is awful. That cooler should have never been on any Hawaii card.

Kind of sitting on the fence. I've always loved nVidia's drivers ( stability, performance vs AMD's track record of drivers ) and to an extent PhysX, but G-Sync is another thing that is holding me back from hitting that buy button. As Maxwell is shaping up, I'm still in two minds. Probably going to wait and see what will happen, there is for me only one game coming out that could change things for me personally.

Regardless, 280x and 290 are just unbelievable performance, for excellent money. Geforce 780 needs to drop in price, stat.

[SubZero.it]

I'm pretty disappointed by this card. The only good thing about it is, that it's cheap. There might be good Custom Designs coming, but i don't understand why Amd isn't able to build a good cooler.
This card is just pushed to the absolute max in power and noise to somehow beat nvidia.

Well...it's always about price and performance.
If you want you can have a turnaround, in this case is a custom cooler.
By the way I'll wait non reference versions.
@SKYTML stop making reviews...last time you made me buy the 670 and now this one? :-P
Great review as usual

Sent from Mako

[PatRaceTin]

Oh my 7970 is obsolete

[Heinz68]

Added few more reviews to the OP
http://www.pcgamer.com/review/amd-radeon-r9-290-review/
http://www.maximumpc.com/amd_radeon_r9_290_benchmarks
http://www.pcworld.com/article/20607...rop-trend.html
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17...r-nvidia-again
http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-rade...-review_127216

also
EK Water Blocks for AMD Radeon R9 290X also Support R9 290

[tbone8ty]

They should of slapped the 7990 cooler on it lol

[Zloyd]

You really wont care that much in a couple of weeks when they will be available in better numbers with all those dual tripple fan coolers.