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
GRID 2
The final game in our benchmark suite is also our racing entry, Codemasters’ GRID 2. Codemasters continues to set the bar for graphical fidelity in racing games, and with GRID 2 they’ve gone back to racing on the pavement, bringing to life cities and highways alike. Based on their in-house EGO engine, GRID 2 includes a DirectCompute based advanced lighting system in its highest quality settings, which incurs a significant performance penalty but does a good job of emulating more realistic lighting within the game world.
Our final benchmark has the 290X and 290 once again closely matched; the 290 trails its higher-tier sibling by just 2%, putting up 78fps at 2560. The GTX 780 for its part does close in on the 290, and although we’re admittedly getting a bit academic since all of these cards are well 60fps, the 290 ultimately beats the GTX 780 by 7%.
Meanwhile the performance gains against the 290’s lower priced competition are uneven. Against the GTX 770 it puts up a very average 27% performance advantage, but with Tahiti cards holding up so well in this game the advantage over the 280X is just 18%.
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carlob - Saturday, December 7, 2013 - link
At the top of the card, above first row of memory chips, there is one micro switch. If i see well, it's written SW1.Does anybody know what is the purpose of the switch? Thanks.
jonabatero - Thursday, December 19, 2013 - link
HELLO: guys test the R9 290 with LUMION 3D . please .could someone please test the performance of the R9 290 with Lumion 3d. serial great buy with the performance of a GTX 770 in Lumion
xaml - Sunday, December 22, 2013 - link
"Ultimately there will be scenarios where this is acceptable – namely, anything where you don’t have to hear the 290, such as putting it in another room or putting it under water (...)."Or the scenario, the one that's neither unreasonable nor rare, which was conveniently left out, namely playing with a headset. I understand, however, that there has to be a balance between more powerful fans and their noise output, especially with cards which typically grew in size, yet reaching a point where both the cards as well as their fans cannot further grow. A truly negative review would have been one where the fan was loud and where it wouldn't adequately support the airflow.
c1phertxt - Tuesday, December 24, 2013 - link
I don't think a lot of people realise how hot this card gets under load. I have a CM HAF XB and an XFX R9 290.When the card is at 100% load, the existing "fan-temp" curve is insufficient to prevent throttling. I see the temps stabilising at 95 C while the fan is at 46%. As a result clocks throttle down to 662 Mhz. I have to set a custom fan profile that sets the fan to atleast 65% to keep the temps at 85C. Even then, the clocks go down to 850Mhz (a 100 Mhz throttle).
Anything over 65% fan speed is deafening (sounds like a blow dryer and at 80%+ it sounds like a vacum cleaner).
Seriously contemplating putting this under water or getting an after market cooler.
jaris - Thursday, June 19, 2014 - link
Been gaming since the mid 70's, so fairly seasoned, the review is good upto the point regards noise, then it becomes silly. Most gamers don't sit in the front room playing whilst the wife watches tv, well I don't, plus I like loud, thats why i use a headset, all the time. R290 is going into my i7 4790k, like quickly. Might have to close the den door a little but well... I have a very decent headset, won't hear anything other than the game playing. ;)