The AMD Radeon R9 290 Review
by Ryan Smith on November 5, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Hawaii
- Radeon 200
Crysis 3
Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
Crysis 3 happens to be another game that the 290X sees significant throttling at, and as such this is another game where the 290X and 290 are neck and neck. With all of a .4fps difference between the two, the two cards are essentially tied, once more showcasing how the 290X is held back in order to get reasonable acoustics, and how fast the 290 can go when it does the opposite and lets loose.
This also ends up being a very close matchup between the 290 and the GTX 780, with the 290 losing to the GTX 780 by just 1%, making for another practical tie. Which coincidentally will make our power and noise tests all the more meaningful, since this is the game we use for those tests.
Meanwhile compared to the GTX 770 and 280X, this is actually the narrowest victory for the 290. Despite the solid performance of the 290 and 290X, it beats the GTX 770 by just 11%. The margin of victory over the 280X however is closer to normal at 29%.
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nushydude - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
The gap between the 290 and 290x seems to shrink when you go up the resolution. Does that mean the cards are held back by the memory? If not, what could be the reason for this behavior?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
At those resolutions they're more likely to be held back by ROP throughput. Keep in mind that both cards have 64 ROPs, and that the 290 is on average clocked higher than the 290X. So the 290 actually has at least marginally greater ROP throughput than 290X.nushydude - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
I cannot imagine how fast the 290 and 290x would be with proper cooling.TheJian - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
About as fast as the many overclocks around the web show. :) Not much faster than that. If by proper you just mean a better fan/heatsink set up. I don't call water proper. If that's what it takes to run "proper" you need to redesign your chip.With 780 vs. 290x overclocked to max they could get 780 won every benchmark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djvZaHHU4I8
Both ref designs, benchmarks at 8:40 or so, so proper cooling won't change much I don't think. You will just get less noise or heat, they already run max at 1075 OC'ed as they show here in the 290 review even. You might end up tied or something with 780 (assuming an OC'ed card with better fan gets 5-10% better) but it's not going to blow your mind and a NON ref fan would get more on 780 over what linustechtips vid shows also.
"Similarly we didn’t encounter any throttling issues with our overclocked settings, with every game (including CoH2) running at 1075MHz sustained."
Above from the OC page in this review. It was never throttled and nobody on the web hit higher than 1125 in a review so you're not going to get much more than anandtech did without maybe water or something.
Guru3D OC: 1075/6000
Hardwarecanucks OC: 1115/5684
Hardwareheaven OC: 1100/5500
PCPerspective OC: 1100/5000
TweakTown OC: 1065/5252
TechpowerUp OC: 1125/6300
Techspot OC: 1090/6400
Bit-tech OC: 1120/5600
I can't remember if they mention how high they got the clock in the linustechtips unboxing video above but you can assume they landed somewhere in the group above.
ddriver - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Amazing performance and value from AMD. This seems just like the GPU for me, since my PC sits in the "server" closet and cables are routed through the wall to my room. Also, amazing compute performance, which is mostly what I need, I might be getting this to replace my aging 470.cartmanasan - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
"To get right to the point then, this [Windforce, DCU2 et.al] is one of a handful of cards we will wholeheartedly recommend. The performance for the price is stunning, ..." - Ryanshodanshok - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Hi Ryan,the review is generally very well done, and I 100% agree with you the at 150$ price difference, the 290 is basically eating into 290X terrirory.
However, the 290X is clearly an super-enthusiast product, headed to an audience that rarely will not overclock the card (replacing its cooler, maybe with a water block). For this audience, loud/power are rarely of any real concern. So we should consider that, while 290 is very near to 290X, the latter has its "uber mode" to be used. Moreover, as the 290X has a lower voltage, and so an higher efficiency, raising the fan speed even above the 47% threshold should give higher performance boost in respect to the 290. HardOCP did a test with a 290X and a >60% fan speed, and performance was quite higher the "normal" uber mode.
Moreover, while I agree that "loud limit" is a personal affair (and my limit is quite low!), it seems that AMD cooler has a not-so-disturbing pitch. To quote another review:
"Subjectively speaking, there are much more annoying coolers in this territory on the decibel meter. The impressively smooth, gradual ramp of fan speeds up and down in the new PowerTune algorithm helps make the noise less noticeable, too. This ain't an FX-5800 Ultra, folks."
Had you the possibility to hear, side-by-side, the new 290 against, say, a 5870? What was more disturbing? It will be fantastic if you can post a wav/mp3 file recorder at normal distance and closed case...
Anyway, as my "GPU performance ego days" are very far away, I think that Nvidia solution retain some strong appeal to silence-lover.
Thank you and regards.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
"Had you the possibility to hear, side-by-side, the new 290 against, say, a 5870? What was more disturbing?"We've benchmarked both of those cards of course. The 290 is without a doubt subjectively louder, which the hard data backs up.
Per Hansson - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Some constructive critisism: You can't measure the power of the whole computer and then run a full page on how the 290 draws more power than the 290X.That can be down to any number of things, like the CPU load being higher because of the different VGA load or the computer just deciding to do something in the background, which the later Windows releases loves to.
Techpowerup isolates the card when measuring power, their numbers are here: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_290/24.h...
Load GPU voltage for the 290X measured at a coil is 1.14v, for the 290 it is 1.17v, so very similar to your card but entirely different power consumption numbers.
faster - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
This review makes me appreciate what a value the 280X is. At $300 it performs admirably in games at 1920 x 1080 where the majority of gamers reside. It has much lower noise than the 290 (46 - 50 under load) and temperatures less than the GTX 770 under load. $100 price differential between the 280x and the 290 is not insubstantial to a budget gamer. The 33% increase in price from the 280x to the 290 is rewarded with a 20% increase in performance (approximately). The 280X is the sweet spot for a budget gamer.AMD's competition with Nvidia is an awesome thing for the consumer. Too bad they can't challenge Intel more. I would like to see Intel cut their extreme edition chips down from $1000 because AMD released a killer alternative.