this card features a Hawaii XT core with
2,816 stream processors clocked at 1.08 gigahertz boost clock 4 gigs of
gddr5 memory on a 512 bit bus and all that's clocked at 5 GHz as well but
spoiler alert that's not actually the interesting thing about this product the
R9 290x lightning from MSI is the
fastest hands down R9 29x card we have
ever tested and really it it feels like
unlocks the potential of AMD's latest
and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen
yet with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts now it's not as simple as I
mean I know that sounds great but it's not as simple as just okay well everyone
should just get R9 290x lightning cards because it's 150 bucks more than a base
R9 290x and even $100 more than MSI's
pretty strong gaming card that has you know a dual fan cooler and some of that
aftermarket stuff that we like to see so like what do you actually get for your
extra $100 well for one thing MSI has moved
beyond the dual fan twin frozer cooler
design to what they're calling the fry frozer and while I'm not necessarily
convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones um
what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is pwm and can be
individually controlled in software so you could actually run how whichever
ones you want however fast you want so you can be like okay well I want the the
86 mm ones on the outside to run faster and the 7mm one I'm going to ramp that
one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up they can
tend to get a little bit whiny and loud so you can actually control that however
you want to um now okay so before we get
into some of the other special stuff it does support the usual AMD technology so
Crossfire up to four-way although you'll need to water cool it if you want to do
that EK does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a
triple slot design out of the box you've got support for AMD mantle uh true audio
powertune which is their Dynamic uh clock speed ramping up and ramping down
to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power you've
got easy Affinity with no DisplayPort monitor required so you could run three
monitors off of two DVI ports in an HDMI port which is really cool or even up to
six displays if you use a DisplayPort Hub and then of course it's got a 4 gig
frame buffer like all r9290 X's for a
better 4K gaming experience it also has some unusual stuff so in the
extremely sexy folding box that actually
has like a drawer at the bottom for the access accessories along with the usual
like you know stickers and Driver disc
and manual and all that stuff is a certificate of stability adapters for
using a multimeter to check voltages and
a replacement vrm heat sink for subzero
cooling now the card itself is designed with Subzero in mind it uses a
completely non-reference PCB with a 12
plus three-phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three PCIe
connectors two eight pins and one six pin something that that power hungry GPU
core in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed
it's got an ln2 bio switch which is something that manufacturers tell us
isn't necessary if you're not going Subzero but this is two cards in a row
now that we've run into weird throttling issues on the first one was the Kingpin
classified 780 Ti from EVGA that was
immediately fixed by enabling ln2 mode and then once ln2 mode was on remember
you turn it off flip the switch cuz you're loading a new BIOS and then reboot it the card was a dream to
overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all so also on the top of the
card we have an LED indicator to show the card's load so in theory um the
lightning logo is green for no load blue for medium and red for a heavy load but
in practice uh once we overclocked it it just kind of stayed red because we were
pushing it pretty pretty hard and then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the
back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time I
did mention that that cooler takes up three slots but I can see why they did
it unlike some three slot coolers I've seen before almost the entire top of the
card is basically a solid like grid of
aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that so in terms
of the sheer Mass the card is extremely heavy so it's not like they just made it
thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it it's three slot because it
actually does perform that well and I
would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers
off and put water blocks on them uh with four of them running especially because
you don't need the interconnects anymore so it would look extremely clean no
Crossfire Bridges it's all done over the PCI Express Bus and would perform
incredibly well now before I hand off to Luke for
benchmarking and telling you guys you know what I've been teasing just exactly
how fast this card is I'd like to give MSI some props here even though they are
asking for a significant premium for the privilege they're giving their customers
the option to push the card as hard as they want with that ln2 BIOS even at the
risk of bricking it and while officially they could reject your warranty for
stuff that you do to it in my experience as long as there's nothing physically
altered on the card when they receive it back they're not going to do that so if
you grab a 290x lightning you can can pretty much go to town on it because
this is a very nicely bended GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually
quite quiet underload cooler an awesome back plate it looks great and okay okay
I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how
Ballin this card is all right guys we're going to start off with the bench we
have a CPU which is a 3960x clocked at 4.0 GHz for our RAM we have our RAM
running at 1866 MHz and for the graphics card it varies so check the overclocking
dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards along with the
graph that we will show in a moment it did well it did pretty much exactly how
I expected and that's not too surprising it's a really well- bended 290x I've
been waiting to get a really well- bended 290x so that it could beat my 780
for a while now and this one did it handily it doesn't beat the 780 Ti which
is again expected but it's still very nice if you're looking for overclocking
tips if you get this card I would highly recommend switching into ln2 mode even
if you're just air cooling this seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability
to the car and I was able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched
into that mode all right guys if you enjoyed this and want to see all the
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