Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
This review of the HIS Radeon R9 290X is of course 95% similar to the reference review. Hey that makes sense as both products aside from the sticker and one driver revision are the same. That makes this conclusion rather simple, with the release of the Radeon R9 290X series AMD brings an incredibly fast product to the market. It rocks all performance scores in pretty much any game to date. Having that much raw unadulterated horsepower under the hood will bring options to the table. You play your games at 2560x1440 and flick on every quality setting that you can think of. Even then the cards will do a terrific job. For the few of you that already made the step towards UHD or 4K gaming at 3840 x 2160 that where these card do make sense. Admittedly just one 290X would probably be borderline acceptable when you select the finest image quality settings. So I foresee that the Ultra High Definition games simply will go for two R9-290X cards setup in Crossfire, which would be my recommendation. The product is often as fast or faster then a GeForce GTX 780 Ti and Titan, whilst it is going to be priced a good chunk lower. So that in retrospect means (even at this price level) performance for money. Honestly I am really excited to see prices below 499 EUR (incl VAT for this little powerhouse of a graphics card. But let's bullet some stuff up and walk through the several segments and experiences from the review.
Cooling & Noise Levels
The cooling itself really remains average. See with the Radeon R9-290 series come temperature targets. The default setting for this will a whopping 94 degrees C, this is configurable though. If you like to have a temperature target of 80 Degrees C you can select that, but at the cost of performance. But sure, that brings flexibility and a nice balance in-between performance, power consumption and temperature. I've stated this in our reference review as well, the R290X reminds me a little of the GeForce GTX 480 release, great performance but a lot of heat. We are confident that the most of you would preferred something a little lower temperature wise. You can obviously change the temperature target of the fan RPM yourself. But at say 80 degrees C and at that level the noise levels are okay. The reality remains that with one card installed you are absolutely fine as in idle you can not hear the cooling solution and under stress, well you can hear a decent amount of airflow but that's it. Not bad, but certainly not good either... rather average noise levels would sum it up well hence we are really looking forward to custom cooled cards from the board partners.
Power Consumption
We expected far worse, power consumption is not bad but again not good either, the card is rated by us having a 290 Watt TDP. That is high but in perspective, it is 30 to 40 Watts away from Titan. So that definitely could have been worse. I think enthusiast consumers at this performance level will not mind that much about the power draw and be forgiving. That 290 Watt TDP also will make running multi-GPU solutions a bit more complicated. With two card we think an 800~900 Watt PSU would be sufficient. So yeah, it's not great to have a GPU consuming that much power, but it could have been a lot worse.
Game Performance
The AMD R9 290X in most scenarios will be performing roughly at Titan or GeForce GTX 780 Ti like performance, that it pretty kick ass for just one GPU with a nicer price-tag. Realistically I should be comparing towards the GeForce GTX 780. Don't forget that you will receive a free copy of Battlefield 4 (Deluxe version with extras and DLC) as well with certain SKUs. Performance wise really there's not one game that won't run seriously good at either of the cards, and that is at the very best image quality settings. And you do it all with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean BioShock infinite at Ultra quality levels is still oozing out 60+ FPS there. Or what about Hitman Absolution with 67 FPS at 2560x1600 High quality and 2xMSAA? It's really nice performance. And especially for those with Ultra High Definition gaming in mind, the 290X will make sense, that or when released, two 290 cards setup in Crossfire. That would be a sweet spot and you'd have 4 GB of graphics memory per GPU, nice!
Overclocking
Overclocking then, a thing or two have changed, the new boost modes for example. Just set your BIOS at Uber mode and disable that stuff. You will now have 50% extra on the power limiter and can play around with a fixed core and memory frequency. I applaud AMD for giving us enthusiasts the option for that Uber mode, NVIDIA can learn from that. Voltage tweaking still needs to be supported by the tweaking tools though. These GPUs can take 1050~1100 MHz fairly well really, and at that stage you added another 10% performance already. The memory can definitely to 6 Gbps more even a notch higher. Please do read-up on what I noted with overclocking through CCC, we highly dis-recommend it.
Concluding
Overall I am very much impressed with the R9-290X cards that AMD brings to the table, realistically though you should buy the non X model, the Radeon HD 290. It's a hundred bucks cheaper while not that far off from the 290X whatsoever. AMD is putting some more pressure on the pricing and you know what that means, in the end that will make the entire enthusiast segment will go down a little in pricing. I expect that in the first two weeks the pricing will be over inflated due to demand and stock, but then once Radeon R9-290X sits at 499 EUR, that where they'll make a real difference. Realistically though we expect sales volume sizes to be on the low side, and that could have an adverse effect on overall pricing.
The HIS R9 290X is an attractive product with 4GB of graphics memory that will bring a significant amount of gaming performance into your PC. The heat levels, and somewhat higher noise levels are the trade-off, well I'll leave it up-to you to decide whether or not you find it acceptable. Bare in mind though that initially only reference boards will be available in the channel, later on in the December time-frame you might see a couple of custom build boards from AIB partners including the ICEQ version from HIS. And that's where these cards are really going to take off in popularity. The 290X is great, but we'll recommend you to get the 'regular' 290 as it will be better value for money. other then that we love the 290 and 290X, but we can't wait until we see the 3rd party cooled editions.
Read our Radeon R9-290X Crossfire article right here.
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