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
Overclocking
Finally, let’s spend a bit of time looking at the overclocking prospects for the 290. Without any voltage adjustment capabilities and with AMD binning chips for clockspeeds and power consumption we’re not necessarily expecting a lot of headroom here, but none the less it’s worth checking out to see how much more we can squeeze out of the card.
Even though we’re officially limited to AMD’s Overdrive utility for the moment for overclocking, Overdrive offers a wide enough range of values that we shouldn’t have any problem maxing out the card. In fact we’ll be limited by the card first.
| Radeon R9 290 Overclocking | |||
| Reference Radeon R9 290 | |||
| Shipping Core Clock | 662MHz | ||
| Shipping Boost Clock | 947MHz | ||
| Shipping Memory Clock | 5GHz | ||
| Shipping Boost Voltage | ~1.18v | ||
| Overclock Core Clock | 790MHz | ||
| Overclock Boost Clock | 1075MHz | ||
| Overclock Memory Clock | 5.6GHz | ||
| Overclock Max Boost Voltage | ~1.18v | ||
Despite the lack of voltage control, when it comes to overclocking the 290 we were able to achieve solid overclocks on both the GPU and the memory. On a boost clock basis we were able to push the 290 from 947MHz to 1075MHz, an increase of 128MHz (14%). Meanwhile we were able to push the memory from 5GHz to 5.6GHz before artifacting set in, representing a 600MHz (12%) memory overclock. Being able to increase both clockspeeds to such a similar degree means that no matter what the video bottleneck is – be it GPU or memory – we should see some kind of performance increase out of overclocking.
On a side note, for overclocking the 290 we stuck with moderate increases to both the maximum fan speed and the PowerTune limit. In the case of the former we used a 65% maximum fan speed (which actually proved to be more than what’s necessary), while for the latter we went with a 20% increase in the PowerTune limit, as at this point in time we don’t have a good idea for what the safe power limits are for the reference 290/290X board. Though in either case only FurMark could push the overclocked card to its power limit, and nothing could push the card to its fan speed limit. Similarly we didn’t encounter any throttling issues with our overclocked settings, with every game (including CoH2) running at 1075MHz sustained.
Taking a brief look at power, temp, and noise before jumping into our gaming performance results, we can see that overclocking the card has a measurable impact on power consumption under both Crysis 3 and FurMark. With Crysis 3 we’re clockspeed limited before we’re power limited, leading to an increase in power consumption of 27W, while under FurMark where we were power limited it’s a much more academic increase of 87W.
Since the 290 already ships at the highest temperate limit it allows – 95C – our sustained temperatures are unchanged even after overclocking.
The 290 is already an unreasonably loud card at stock, and unfortunately the fan speed increases needed to handle the greater heat load from overclocking only make this worse. Under Crysis 3 we peaked at 59.7dB, or 49% fan speed. While under FurMark we peaked at 65.3dB, or 59% fan speed. For these noise levels to be bearable the 290 really needs to be fully isolated (e.g. in another room) or put under water, as otherwise 59.7dB sustained is immensely loud for a video card.
Finally getting to the matter of game performance, we’re seeing consistently strong scaling across every game in our collection. The specific performance increase depends on the game as always, but a 14% core overclock and 12% memory overclock has netted us anywhere between 9% in Metro up to the full 14% in Total War: Rome II. At this performance level the 290 OC exceeds the performance of any other single-GPU card at stock, and comes very close to delivering 60fps in every action game in our benchmark suite.
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TheJian - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Simple economics...NV doesn't make as much as they did in 2007. They are not gouging anyone and should be charging more (so should AMD) and neither side should be handing out free games. Do you want them to be able to afford engineers and good drivers or NOT? AMD currently can't afford them due to your price love, so you get crap drivers that still are not fixed. It's sad people don't understand the reason you have crap drivers is they have lost $6Billion in 10yrs! R&D isn't FREE and the king of the hill gets to charge more than the putz. Why do you think their current card is 10db’s higher in noise, 50-70 watts higher and far hotter? NO R&D money.NV made ~550mil last 12 months (made $850 in 2007). Intel made ~10Billion (made under 7B 2007, so profits WAY UP, NV way down). Also INtel had 54B in assets 2007, now has 84billion! Who's raping you? The Nvidia hate is hilarious. I like good drivers, always improving products, and new perf/features. That means they need to PROFIT or we'll get crappy drivers from NV also.
Microsoft 2007=14B, this year $21B (again UP HUGE!)
Assets 2007=64B, 2013=146Billion HOLY SHITE.
Who's raping you...IT isn't Nvidia...They are not doing nearly as well as 2007. So if they were even raping you then, now they're just asking you to show them your boobs...ROFL. MSFT/INtel on the other hand are asking you to bend over and take it like a man, oh and give me your wallet when I'm done, hey and that car too, heck sign over your house please...
APPLE 2007=~3Bil profits 2013=41Billion (holy 13.5x the raping).
Assets 2007=25B, wait for it...2013=176Billion!
bend over and take it like a man, oh and give me your wallet when I'm done, hey and that car too, heck sign over your house please...Did you mention you're planning on having kids?...Name them Apple and I want them as slaves too...LOL
Are we clear people. NV makes less now than 2007 and hasn't made near that 850mil since. Why? Because market forces are keeping them down which is only hurting them, and their R&D (that force is AMD, who by the way make ZERO). AMD is killing themselves and fools posting crap like this is why (OK, it's managements fault for charging stupidly low prices and giving out free games). You can thank the price of your card for your crappy AMD drivers
Doesn't anyone want AMD to make money? Ask for HIGHER PRICES! Not lower, and quit demonizing NV (or AMD) who doesn't make NEAR what they did in 2007! Intel killed their chipset business and cost them a few hundred million each year. See how that works. If profits for these two companies don't start going up we're all going to get slower product releases (witness what just happened, no new cards for 2yrs if you can even call AMD's new as it just catches OLD NV cards and runs hot doing it), and we can all expect CRAP DRIVERS with those slower released cards.
AMD finally made a profit in the last year 1/2 this Q (only 48mil and less depending on if you look gaap, non-gaap). AMD has lost over 6Billion in 10yrs. They are not charging you enough. I expect them to lose money again as they owe $200mil to GF Dec 31st which will wipe out last Q profit and kill this Q also. See the point? They need to make money. How is it possible for either side to be ripping us off if neither has made as much as they did in 2007 for 6 years with AMD losing their collective ARSE?
I could give you the Hard Drive makers profits etc and would show the same (or worse) as MS, Apple, Google. The flood allowed them all triple profits (quad in Seagates case). YES, this is ripping us off.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
TL;DRSenti - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Good drivers from NV? Ha-ha-ha! You've never run anything besides few overhyped games I guess. They are awful the moment you start programming them:You use some obscure feature of standard that is not used in games? Here, have a bluescreen! Even AMD video drivers weren't so bad recently.
File in bug report? Ignored, who cares about you, you are not making one of top tier games.
Want OpenCL 1.2 like the rest of the world has (even integrated Intel videocards)? No, it's not important – here you are ten new versions of CUDA!
And how about crippled OpenGL for non-Quadro cards? Sure I know what I'm talking about since I have Quadro too.
dragonsqrrl - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Your comment is nothing but an exercise in ambiguity. So basically what you're saying is that because Nvidia's drivers don't work perfectly for every user, AMD's drivers are superior. Really?The one sentence that's actually applicable to gaming is just about as vague as you can get, maybe because you don't actually know what you're talking about? Bluescreen, really? Okay... And from an end user perspective wtf does it even mean to program a driver? Are you suggesting you're something more than an end user? Are you suggesting you work for Nvidia? lol...
Whatever driver related bsod problems you were having is unlikely to be systemic, and may not even be driver related at all. Almost all of the Nvidia driver issues I've read about in recent memory (past couple of years) have been isolated incidents that may result in instability for certain users, none of which I've experienced myself (GTX480). Optimizations compared to the competition have been spot on, and title support has been fantastic. The only exception I can think of was the fan controller issue a couple years ago. Compare that to AMD's recent driver issues (xfire, surround, 4k, frame pacing, etc), all of which are systemic and widespread. I think most AMD fanboys choose to either ignore these problems, or accept them as the norm (same with fan noise on stock coolers), which is stupid and self defeating in my opinion. That sort of attitude doesn't drive AMD or Nvidia to improve.
Senti - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I'm talking from developer's point, can you even read? You probably have no clue about programming if those sounded ambiguous and you even suggested that I work for NV, lol.I don't say that AMD's drivers are superior, but I can surely say that "NV drivers are superior" is one big lie. They are both bad, really.
I can tell you some fun things about AMD's drivers too: like, uploading textures of certain sizes crashes them, or how their OpenCL compiler crashes on certain C99 features. But those are just program-level crashes (not system-level) and I see texture crash only in recent beta versions, not the last stable version; haven't really investigated OpenCL ones. On the other hand I can reliably send NV drivers into bluescreen, but as already said, it's quite obscure feature and simple users have very low chance to stumble upon it.
Conclusion: we do love AMD for their performance/price ratio while there is nothing to love NV for except being mindless fanboy. My personal view of current situation, feel free to disagree.
nsiboro - Wednesday, November 6, 2013 - link
TL;DRNvidia isn't doing only GPU. Do not forget Tegra - acquisition of comm IP, etc. do require $$$.
The raping is true.
GPU revenue dump into ARM/mobile for future survival.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
I like how they actually explicitly recommend against the card and the first 5 comments are praising it XD.That's a LOT of noise... but when we get custom coolers this will be really, really exciting.
RussianSensation - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Yup, customs coolers will fix both the noise levels and temperature issues. After that, this card will be a must buy. 2 Windforce 3x (dual slot) and $699 780Ti is irrelevant. In fact, after-market versions of R9 290 will make 780/R9 290X and 780Ti very overpriced. They can't get here soon enough.dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
Well, sometimes you just can't fix fanboism.Tetracycloide - Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - link
How puerile.