AMD Radeon R9 290X reviews

Well, I've been GPU mining litecoins and at the same time playing Skyrim at max. settings + custom ini config without big frame time spikes. For cGminer if I set intensity to 12 or 13 I have no problem maintaining 60FPS, with intensity 14 it starts to stutter a bit here and there, but still maintains 60FPS.
Best of both worlds as I earn for used electricity by mining while at the same time having good fun in a game

 

For me, folding & watching 720p movie causes noticeable lag. Haven't update Catalyst in mounths. Should I try that now? Still on VLIW here, so no high hopes it will work.

 

Yes, keep your drivers updated.

But I still don't understand these loads things, how is it possible to use the GPU for two tasks without sacrificing the performance, on both, or on a particular?

 

It would be nice to have a WHQL driver available from this year.

 

Supposedly some time next month. Until then, use the betas, they seem to be very stable for most people.

 

If you have old hardware, especially if it's VLIW/pre-GCN, I doubt anything would change at all. From what I understand, this would relate to the additional compute job queues (ACEs or whatever the technical term is) that were added in hawaii.

Diablo3 probably uses few and simple shaders, which might explain why the game runs relatively unaffected while running heavy GPGPU at the same time.

Yeah, AMD goes from one extreme of doing a disappointing job of updating its drivers every month* , to just doing a disappointing job of updating them at all. Now at over three months without an updated WHQL, and no support for one of the biggest new features in their new flagship GPU in the current, aging WHQL? That is indeed disappointing.



*I'm sure you guys remember the RAGE launch driver debacle for example, with multiple fixes and hotfixes coming and going in different versions of the driver over several months.

 

Maybe they've finally completed them ? how long does it take to write a driver

 

To anyone with R9 290X, particularly ASUS R9 290X DirectCU-II OC;

Have you noticed any glitching in Fire Strike (I see it in the demo, not necessarily in the main benchmark)? It appears as feather/fan-like patterns of large, solid-color squares, particularly in areas of the screen affected by heat shimmer. Overclocking the card obviously influences the appearance of these patterns, as does heat; making sure the GPU is warm makes the patterns show up earlier in the test run.

Note that the GPU doesn't ever run overly hot, it doesn't get above 85C or so, and due to being factory overclocked I see the glitching even at "stock" settings - although it may only make two or three appearances in a demo run. If bumping clocks say 2.5%, then there's heavy glitching with my card as soon as the fans start to spin rapidly.

 

To anyone that's using the gpus to mine: if you have a intel CPU with integrated GPU you can attach both the AMD gpu and the Intel GPU to the same monitor, and just switch between them with WIN+P, which means you can have the AMD GPU fully used for mining AND a responsive desktop (and possibly some light games) by switching to the Intel GPU.

 

Surely people with amd cpu's can do the same
Edit: yes you can also use ATI Hybrid Graphics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Hybrid_Graphics

 

And now its four months since the last WHQL.

 

I picked up a 290X off eBay. One of the sweet but worrisome deals from someone selling off a bunch of cards he used for mining. Came boxed and with the BF4 coupon. It is a lot faster than my previous 6950 as one might expect. Also a lot hotter as one might expect lol.

 

nice , I grabbed a 7950 for $120 on ebay to replace my 6950 (my girls 4850 gave up the ghost finally) I bought the kraken g10 and a corsair h55 water cooler. I'm going to hook it up but from what I'm reading its basicly going to keep it a few degrees warmer than room temp. So i'm very excited the fans on mine get very loud.

 

R9 290 has finally dropped back down to MSRP (399 USD) on Newegg. I might actually think about getting one soon.

Although this makes me wonder if they might drop lower than that or not.

Regards,
SB

 

Since I switched from two geforce 770s to one 290X, my heat actually went down considerably. Peak performance as well unfortunately, but not all THAT much really that it's anything catastrophic.

 

I can see that. But a 290X runs about 100W more power than a 6970 so for me it is noticeably hotter.

I pulled off the stock cooler and have put my trusty Thermalright TRAD2 on it. I put the OEM baseplate/heatsink combo in the oven to remove the soldered-on main vapor chamber heat sink. Modified the baseplate frame a bit to fit with the TRAD and cool the RAM and VRMs. It is quite quiet now and doesn't get up to 95C as easily as with the stock hair drier. But the TRAD is at its limit with this GPU.

It's something that AMD decided to cool Hawaii with a cooler similar to what was used for 6950/6970. The vapor chamber sink looks like it is the same size.

 

The T-RAD 2 always struck me as a monster heatsink, but maybe it is simply too old to cope these days. My Asus board with its fairly hefty cooler doesn't get above 85C running folding, however it might rise some more in the coming weeks due to summer starting to manifest itself - it may have been as much as 21C outside today where I live, quite warm for this time of year. Fans spin at 53% at most right now. A week ago when it was significantly cooler outside, they barely went above 50%.

Putting the 6970 cooler on such a hot GPU as hawaii was a terrible decision of AMD, the OEM 6970 was already infamous for being loud, especially in SLI, and now... Ye gods. It's nice to know you managed to fix that issue at least mostly though with that thermalright cooler. Amazing that it even fits at all, after all this time!

 

AMD/ATI has had the same mounting points since forever. At least the HD 2000 series. It's convenient. I bought the TRAD2 for my 6950 and even at that point the TRAD2 was old since it was meant for the GTX 2xx and 4xxx cards.

 

Aye! Indeed convenient, one has to say! I had some ideas myself of sticking the TRAD2 on my cards, but it fell on the whole amalgamation of graphics card, cooler and fans becoming too thick to allow SLI setup in my then-PC.

Anyway, it's a real beaut of a cooler, with all those thick shiny heatpipes. Perhaps a bit heatpipe heavy in the pipe-to-fin ratio tho. Maybe that is why it's coming up a bit short on the latest GPUs. Have you investigated if its performance is at all affected of the orientation of the cooler? Even though it's often claimed heatpipes are basically immune to orientation this is apparantly not the case I hear, and considering the pipes in the TRAD are folded into a huge U-shape...

 

Swaaye, I can't believe R9 290X takes 100W more power than HD6970!
Either you have both really good HD6970 sample and really bad R9 290X sample or something else is amiss.
I had quite power hungry HD6970 and HD7970 which followed was about 20W more power hungry. Now my R9 290X in games is from about on par to +30W more power hungry than HD7970.
Best part is, when you play with vSync ON R9 290X is usually on par to quite a bit better with power than HD 7970 was

Regarding heatsink, I'm running Gelid IcyVision with modified OEM plate and it rocks, especially after running Gelid fans through fan controller it is both cool and quiet
Max. temps under gaming around 70C with OC clocks of 1050/1325MHz.