buy an Intel knock barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game
items for Planet Side 2 click now to learn more now I have to admit I feel
like AMD was trolling us reviewers a little bit with the release of the 290x
and the 290 and I guess I've been trolling you guys a little bit lately
with unboxings that don't have boxes in them so I am going to rectify that by
showing you the box that the Radeon r9290 came in unboxing
the card and then proceeding to get on
with the review of the card which for something like this where quite frankly
that's what you should do with the box then install it in your system and enjoy it enjoy the gaming Bliss that comes
with it is probably what you should do as well now what do I mean by trolling
us well I mean the card works and it's great that's all fine and good but what
AMD did is they released two cards that are pretty much the same thing days
apart so that we get to make separate videos outlining pretty much the same
information twice in a row so if you guys have watched the 290x video you
probably already know most of what I'm about to say so go ahead and Skip forward to the performance numbers which
are where this card is really going to prove its worth price to Performance my
friends so without further Ado it uses the same gcn architecture as the
previous Edition 7000 series as well as the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4
meaning that AMD's ah yes their API
called mantle is is going to be able to borrow a lot of the development
principles that go into making console games and bring them to the PC so a more
bare to metal programming approach that should give AMD's cards when they're
running the mantle API and the game has to specifically support it the first
one's going to be Battlefield 4 a huge performance Advantage it's got over 6
billion transistors and unlike the 290x
it is clocked at only 947 mahz maximum
versus 1 GHz for the 290x and it has its stream processors cut down a little bit
too so it has 2560 stream processors other than that
it is pretty much the same card it has 4 gigs of RAM running on a 512-bit bus so
these cards are designed for high resolution gaming that is to say 2 and
1/2k or 4K or you might as well go for
something like a 280X unless you really want to crank up the antialiasing
completely through the roof or be ready for you know next Generation games at
1080p it's not designed for 1080p my friends it has a newer optimized fan
profile but that doesn't change the fact that it is a little bit on the louder
side the good news is that when it ramps up and ramps down it does so much more
smoothly than their previous generation fan controller design it has their new
updated powertune technology that factors in the GPU clock the voltage the
temperature and the power consumption in order to give you as much perf or
performance as possible out of the card at any given time now this changes the
way over clock works so they have a new graphical user interface for
overclocking where basically instead of overclocking to a frequency now you
overclock based on a percentage and you give the card thresholds within which to
work where you say okay I'm okay with this much more than the recommended
power I'm okay with this much more than the recommended clock speed do your best
and then the card will deliver to you whatever it can Although our 290x review
revealed that there wasn't much overclocking Headroom on that card maybe
we find out that things are a little bit different here speaking of not much
overclocking head room they come dialed in at 95° don't be surprised when your
290 or 290x runs at 95° Celsius
underload this is by Design AMD is switching voltages and clock speeds
about every 10 micros seconds in order to squeeze as much performance out of
the card as possible if you don't like it just like NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0
technology just turn it down just use the slider say okay I'm only comfortable
with 80° AMD is saying it's not going to affect the longevity of the card They
probably know better than us but hey who knows heat does make integrated circuits
die eventually so there you go whatever you're comfortable with dial it in at
that it'll just turn down the performance of the card a little bit or
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
mode so there's a switch on the top of the card towards the back of the card
towards the fan is Uber mode that is what we use for our testing what you
also might have noticed looking close up at the card right there is there are no Crossfire connectors all the crossfire
communication is done through that PCI Express 16x interface down there at the
bottom it's PCIe 3.0 ready but don't worry even if you're running PCIe 2.0 8X
slots AMD hasn't observed any performance difference between running
connectors and not running connectors so the rest of the card physically this is
fascinating here at the back two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort no analog
output whatsoever not even with adapters but what's cool is you can run Infinity
using any of these three ports now and up to six display using a DisplayPort
hub off of a single card without needing a specific fancy special ifinity 6
Edition card it takes one six pin and one 8 Pin power connector and it has a
pretty sexy looking shroud overall there's not much to see on the back of
the card because all of the memory chips are actually soldered on the front of
the c a bit of an unusual design for something that has 16 memory chips on it
which is a requirement if you're going to have a 512-bit memory bus because it
actually reads and writes to every one of those chips all at the same time and
that's how you're able to achieve the massive bandwidth that AMD has with this
particular graphics card so they've also got true audio built into this card the
260x and the 290x that is a dedicated
onboard digital sound processor that will allow games to leverage it if they
take advantage of it there's middlewares that are going to support it it's really going to depend on dev support and right
now there's only three cards that actually have true audio Hardware on
them so it might not be as relevant for now but in the future it will be a less
cluggy and more CPU resource efficient
way to implement much much better audio that's more immersive in games and I
appreciate AMD being a Pioneer in the whole graphics card audio thing I mean
they were the first ones to put audio over HDMI on a graphics card way back in
the day as well another note on mantle guys is much like true audio it depends
on developer support So mantle can potentially dramatically improve the
performance not only of this card but also 7,000 series cards but we've yet to
see a game engine that actually implements it yet once it's done it
might be a simple as for end users automatically detecting your AMD gcn
graphics card or even just being a drop down and giving you like huge
performance improvements but until we actually see anything it's really really
hard for us to say now I'm going to hand off to Luke to give you guys the
performance numbers before we start I cannot emphasize this enough please
listen to me we run all of our graphics
cards overclocked that is why our numbers are
different from other review viewers I hope that was clear enough if you have
any Curiosities about the kinds of overclocks that we're running on the
cards we will link our overclocking master sheet under the video so you can
see exactly what clock speeds were at our 290x wasn't a particularly great
overclocker in our in our 29x review it wasn't that bad either I mean it was
functional it did overclock a little bit it wasn't as bad as our old
7870 but um you know we had people
saying that we were putting it up against the GTX 780 lightning we weren't
that was just a standard GTX 780 reference card that wasn't a
particularly great overclocker we're looking into ways we can tweak this
methodology maybe using something like average overclocks on Hardware bought on
every card or something along those lines but the cold hard truth is we are
not changing the way we run overclocked cards because we feel that it is the one
thing that we can do a little bit differently here versus everyone else
who is running the card stock if your complaint is everyone else runs the card
stock why are your numbers different why are you even looking at our numbers if you know they're not going to be
different if you want to see stock benchmarks go to any one of the
literally 100 to 200 other review sites that run them and go look at them there
without further Ado here's slick so the first thing you're going to notice is that the r9290 did really well like
really really well like better than 290x well and a little bit more research into
this topic brought up that what likely happened was I got a not super great
overclocker for my 290x and a really really good overclocker for my 290 how
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
can right when I first get them because we don't have any averages and we don't know how well they overclock immediately
so on the launch video it'll be as hard as I can get it for overclocked and then after that we're
going to go with hardware bot averages so in the future after a bunch of people
have gotten the card and after a bunch of people have submitted averages to
hardware bot we will actually be adjusting our cards to that in the past
we had kept it with the launch overclock to make it consistent throughout all of
our testing but we believe that going with the hardware bot averages will be
more representative of what the average consumer will get in the field so what
are your takeaways knowing that we're going to start rebalancing for hardware bot and knowing that we're going to swap
out the 290x for one that can overclock a little bit closer to hardware bot
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
line for it so that'll be good um the 290 is extremely hot it's Extremely Loud
it consumes a very large amount of power and it crushes
benchmarks if you can deal with the power consumption if you can deal with the heat if you can deal with the sound
it's a really powerful card at a really good price point and that's just
something people are going to want to deal with it's pulling more power in a lot of situations than a 480 for those
of you guys that remember 480s that is pretty insane but this thing is very
powerful for its price if you have a high price point and you want to
purchase the king of this generation you have a little bit of waiting left to do
mantle and 780 Ti are still yet to flex their muscles and we are not sure
exactly how this battle is going to play out but if you're looking at around a $400 graphics card it might be decision
time now if you like the video like the video If you dislike the video dislike
the video and in the comments below what's your tradeoff are you going for
really heavy crazy performance but taking in power consumption heat and
sound or are you going for the more allaround comfortable experience with
maybe a little bit less performance leave that in the comments below and as
always please subscribe to lonus
techtips
he