WEBVTT

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this card features a Hawaii XT core with

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2,816 stream processors clocked at 1.08 gigahertz boost clock 4 gigs of

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gddr5 memory on a 512 bit bus and all that's clocked at 5 GHz as well but

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spoiler alert that's not actually the interesting thing about this product the

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R9 290x lightning from MSI is the

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fastest hands down R9 29x card we have

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ever tested and really it it feels like

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unlocks the potential of AMD's latest

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and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen

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yet with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an

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amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts now it's not as simple as I

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mean I know that sounds great but it's not as simple as just okay well everyone

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should just get R9 290x lightning cards because it's 150 bucks more than a base

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R9 290x and even $100 more than MSI's

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pretty strong gaming card that has you know a dual fan cooler and some of that

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aftermarket stuff that we like to see so like what do you actually get for your

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extra $100 well for one thing MSI has moved

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beyond the dual fan twin frozer cooler

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design to what they're calling the fry frozer and while I'm not necessarily

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convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones um

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what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is pwm and can be

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individually controlled in software so you could actually run how whichever

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ones you want however fast you want so you can be like okay well I want the the

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86 mm ones on the outside to run faster and the 7mm one I'm going to ramp that

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one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up they can

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tend to get a little bit whiny and loud so you can actually control that however

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you want to um now okay so before we get

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into some of the other special stuff it does support the usual AMD technology so

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Crossfire up to four-way although you'll need to water cool it if you want to do

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that EK does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a

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triple slot design out of the box you've got support for AMD mantle uh true audio

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powertune which is their Dynamic uh clock speed ramping up and ramping down

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to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power you've

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got easy Affinity with no DisplayPort monitor required so you could run three

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monitors off of two DVI ports in an HDMI port which is really cool or even up to

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six displays if you use a DisplayPort Hub and then of course it's got a 4 gig

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frame buffer like all r9290 X's for a

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better 4K gaming experience it also has some unusual stuff so in the

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extremely sexy folding box that actually

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has like a drawer at the bottom for the access accessories along with the usual

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like you know stickers and Driver disc

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and manual and all that stuff is a certificate of stability adapters for

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using a multimeter to check voltages and

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a replacement vrm heat sink for subzero

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cooling now the card itself is designed with Subzero in mind it uses a

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completely non-reference PCB with a 12

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plus three-phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three PCIe

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connectors two eight pins and one six pin something that that power hungry GPU

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core in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed

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it's got an ln2 bio switch which is something that manufacturers tell us

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isn't necessary if you're not going Subzero but this is two cards in a row

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now that we've run into weird throttling issues on the first one was the Kingpin

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classified 780 Ti from EVGA that was

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immediately fixed by enabling ln2 mode and then once ln2 mode was on remember

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you turn it off flip the switch cuz you're loading a new BIOS and then reboot it the card was a dream to

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overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all so also on the top of the

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card we have an LED indicator to show the card's load so in theory um the

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lightning logo is green for no load blue for medium and red for a heavy load but

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in practice uh once we overclocked it it just kind of stayed red because we were

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pushing it pretty pretty hard and then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the

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back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time I

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did mention that that cooler takes up three slots but I can see why they did

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it unlike some three slot coolers I've seen before almost the entire top of the

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card is basically a solid like grid of

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aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that so in terms

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of the sheer Mass the card is extremely heavy so it's not like they just made it

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thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it it's three slot because it

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actually does perform that well and I

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would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers

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off and put water blocks on them uh with four of them running especially because

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you don't need the interconnects anymore so it would look extremely clean no

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Crossfire Bridges it's all done over the PCI Express Bus and would perform

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incredibly well now before I hand off to Luke for

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benchmarking and telling you guys you know what I've been teasing just exactly

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how fast this card is I'd like to give MSI some props here even though they are

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asking for a significant premium for the privilege they're giving their customers

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the option to push the card as hard as they want with that ln2 BIOS even at the

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risk of bricking it and while officially they could reject your warranty for

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stuff that you do to it in my experience as long as there's nothing physically

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altered on the card when they receive it back they're not going to do that so if

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you grab a 290x lightning you can can pretty much go to town on it because

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this is a very nicely bended GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually

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quite quiet underload cooler an awesome back plate it looks great and okay okay

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I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how

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Ballin this card is all right guys we're going to start off with the bench we

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have a CPU which is a 3960x clocked at 4.0 GHz for our RAM we have our RAM

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running at 1866 MHz and for the graphics card it varies so check the overclocking

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dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards along with the

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graph that we will show in a moment it did well it did pretty much exactly how

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I expected and that's not too surprising it's a really well- bended 290x I've

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been waiting to get a really well- bended 290x so that it could beat my 780

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for a while now and this one did it handily it doesn't beat the 780 Ti which

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is again expected but it's still very nice if you're looking for overclocking

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tips if you get this card I would highly recommend switching into ln2 mode even

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if you're just air cooling this seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability

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to the car and I was able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched

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into that mode all right guys if you enjoyed this and want to see all the

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rest of our Linus Tech tips content be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech tips

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click like share favorite all that kind of stuff and comment on whether or not

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this is a card you're interested in I know some of the American viewers might be a little bit shaky about getting it

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just to the cost prohibiti there is on buying a 290 X in the states right now

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due to coin mining and all that kind of stuff but if you want to talk about that more maybe jump over to the Forum it's a

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little bit friendlier of a comment section and if you want to get rid of those ads on the Forum you can always

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contribute any contribution level on the Forum gets rid of all the ads so yeah

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thanks for watching I'll see you guys next time