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buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game

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items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more now I have to admit I feel

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like AMD was trolling us reviewers a little bit with the release of the 290x

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and the 290 and I guess I've been trolling you guys a little bit lately

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with unboxings that don't have boxes in them so I am going to rectify that by

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showing you the box that the Radeon r9290 came in unboxing

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the card and then proceeding to get on

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with the review of the card which for something like this where quite frankly

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that's what you should do with the box then install it in your system and enjoy it enjoy the gaming Bliss that comes

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with it is probably what you should do as well now what do I mean by trolling

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us well I mean the card works and it's great that's all fine and good but what

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AMD did is they released two cards that are pretty much the same thing days

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apart so that we get to make separate videos outlining pretty much the same

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information twice in a row so if you guys have watched the 290x video you

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probably already know most of what I'm about to say so go ahead and Skip forward to the performance numbers which

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are where this card is really going to prove its worth price to Performance my

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friends so without further Ado it uses the same gcn architecture as the

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previous Edition 7000 series as well as the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4

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meaning that AMD's ah yes their API

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called mantle is is going to be able to borrow a lot of the development

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principles that go into making console games and bring them to the PC so a more

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bare to metal programming approach that should give AMD's cards when they're

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running the mantle API and the game has to specifically support it the first

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one's going to be Battlefield 4 a huge performance Advantage it's got over 6

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billion transistors and unlike the 290x

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it is clocked at only 947 mahz maximum

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versus 1 GHz for the 290x and it has its stream processors cut down a little bit

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too so it has 2560 stream processors other than that

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it is pretty much the same card it has 4 gigs of RAM running on a 512-bit bus so

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these cards are designed for high resolution gaming that is to say 2 and

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1/2k or 4K or you might as well go for

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something like a 280X unless you really want to crank up the antialiasing

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completely through the roof or be ready for you know next Generation games at

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1080p it's not designed for 1080p my friends it has a newer optimized fan

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profile but that doesn't change the fact that it is a little bit on the louder

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side the good news is that when it ramps up and ramps down it does so much more

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smoothly than their previous generation fan controller design it has their new

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updated powertune technology that factors in the GPU clock the voltage the

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temperature and the power consumption in order to give you as much perf or

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performance as possible out of the card at any given time now this changes the

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way over clock works so they have a new graphical user interface for

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overclocking where basically instead of overclocking to a frequency now you

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overclock based on a percentage and you give the card thresholds within which to

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work where you say okay I'm okay with this much more than the recommended

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power I'm okay with this much more than the recommended clock speed do your best

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and then the card will deliver to you whatever it can Although our 290x review

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revealed that there wasn't much overclocking Headroom on that card maybe

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we find out that things are a little bit different here speaking of not much

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overclocking head room they come dialed in at 95° don't be surprised when your

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290 or 290x runs at 95° Celsius

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underload this is by Design AMD is switching voltages and clock speeds

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about every 10 micros seconds in order to squeeze as much performance out of

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the card as possible if you don't like it just like NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0

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technology just turn it down just use the slider say okay I'm only comfortable

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with 80° AMD is saying it's not going to affect the longevity of the card They

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probably know better than us but hey who knows heat does make integrated circuits

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die eventually so there you go whatever you're comfortable with dial it in at

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that it'll just turn down the performance of the card a little bit or

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you can choose to ramp up the fan speed a little bit more if you want speaking of fan speed there's quiet mode and Uber

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mode so there's a switch on the top of the card towards the back of the card

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towards the fan is Uber mode that is what we use for our testing what you

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also might have noticed looking close up at the card right there is there are no Crossfire connectors all the crossfire

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communication is done through that PCI Express 16x interface down there at the

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bottom it's PCIe 3.0 ready but don't worry even if you're running PCIe 2.0 8X

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slots AMD hasn't observed any performance difference between running

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connectors and not running connectors so the rest of the card physically this is

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fascinating here at the back two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort no analog

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output whatsoever not even with adapters but what's cool is you can run Infinity

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using any of these three ports now and up to six display using a DisplayPort

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hub off of a single card without needing a specific fancy special ifinity 6

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Edition card it takes one six pin and one 8 Pin power connector and it has a

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pretty sexy looking shroud overall there's not much to see on the back of

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the card because all of the memory chips are actually soldered on the front of

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the c a bit of an unusual design for something that has 16 memory chips on it

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which is a requirement if you're going to have a 512-bit memory bus because it

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actually reads and writes to every one of those chips all at the same time and

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that's how you're able to achieve the massive bandwidth that AMD has with this

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particular graphics card so they've also got true audio built into this card the

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260x and the 290x that is a dedicated

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onboard digital sound processor that will allow games to leverage it if they

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take advantage of it there's middlewares that are going to support it it's really going to depend on dev support and right

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now there's only three cards that actually have true audio Hardware on

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them so it might not be as relevant for now but in the future it will be a less

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cluggy and more CPU resource efficient

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way to implement much much better audio that's more immersive in games and I

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appreciate AMD being a Pioneer in the whole graphics card audio thing I mean

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they were the first ones to put audio over HDMI on a graphics card way back in

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the day as well another note on mantle guys is much like true audio it depends

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on developer support So mantle can potentially dramatically improve the

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performance not only of this card but also 7,000 series cards but we've yet to

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see a game engine that actually implements it yet once it's done it

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might be a simple as for end users automatically detecting your AMD gcn

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graphics card or even just being a drop down and giving you like huge

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performance improvements but until we actually see anything it's really really

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hard for us to say now I'm going to hand off to Luke to give you guys the

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performance numbers before we start I cannot emphasize this enough please

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listen to me we run all of our graphics

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cards overclocked that is why our numbers are

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different from other review viewers I hope that was clear enough if you have

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any Curiosities about the kinds of overclocks that we're running on the

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cards we will link our overclocking master sheet under the video so you can

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see exactly what clock speeds were at our 290x wasn't a particularly great

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overclocker in our in our 29x review it wasn't that bad either I mean it was

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functional it did overclock a little bit it wasn't as bad as our old

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7870 but um you know we had people

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saying that we were putting it up against the GTX 780 lightning we weren't

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that was just a standard GTX 780 reference card that wasn't a

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particularly great overclocker we're looking into ways we can tweak this

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methodology maybe using something like average overclocks on Hardware bought on

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every card or something along those lines but the cold hard truth is we are

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not changing the way we run overclocked cards because we feel that it is the one

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thing that we can do a little bit differently here versus everyone else

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who is running the card stock if your complaint is everyone else runs the card

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stock why are your numbers different why are you even looking at our numbers if you know they're not going to be

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different if you want to see stock benchmarks go to any one of the

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literally 100 to 200 other review sites that run them and go look at them there

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without further Ado here's slick so the first thing you're going to notice is that the r9290 did really well like

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really really well like better than 290x well and a little bit more research into

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this topic brought up that what likely happened was I got a not super great

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overclocker for my 290x and a really really good overclocker for my 290 how

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we're going to address this in the future is we're going to continue to have me overclock the cards as hard as I

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can right when I first get them because we don't have any averages and we don't know how well they overclock immediately

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so on the launch video it'll be as hard as I can get it for overclocked and then after that we're

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going to go with hardware bot averages so in the future after a bunch of people

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have gotten the card and after a bunch of people have submitted averages to

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hardware bot we will actually be adjusting our cards to that in the past

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we had kept it with the launch overclock to make it consistent throughout all of

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our testing but we believe that going with the hardware bot averages will be

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more representative of what the average consumer will get in the field so what

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are your takeaways knowing that we're going to start rebalancing for hardware bot and knowing that we're going to swap

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out the 290x for one that can overclock a little bit closer to hardware bot

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levels in the future thank you ASUS we're going to be getting an aftermarket one from them I don't know when we're in

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line for it so that'll be good um the 290 is extremely hot it's Extremely Loud

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it consumes a very large amount of power and it crushes

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benchmarks if you can deal with the power consumption if you can deal with the heat if you can deal with the sound

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it's a really powerful card at a really good price point and that's just

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something people are going to want to deal with it's pulling more power in a lot of situations than a 480 for those

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of you guys that remember 480s that is pretty insane but this thing is very

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powerful for its price if you have a high price point and you want to

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purchase the king of this generation you have a little bit of waiting left to do

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mantle and 780 Ti are still yet to flex their muscles and we are not sure

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exactly how this battle is going to play out but if you're looking at around a $400 graphics card it might be decision

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time now if you like the video like the video If you dislike the video dislike

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the video and in the comments below what's your tradeoff are you going for

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really heavy crazy performance but taking in power consumption heat and

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sound or are you going for the more allaround comfortable experience with

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maybe a little bit less performance leave that in the comments below and as

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always please subscribe to lonus

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techtips

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he