by and unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or core i5 processor and get a free copy
of Rome 2 Total War click now to learn more the AMD Radeon r9290 when it
launched to turn the graphics card Market pretty much on its ear by
delivering performance competitive with the then $700 plus gtx780 at
$400 there were some issues however power tune is AMD's technology that
balances power consumption clock speed temperature and fan speed so while the
card is advertised to run it up to 947
MHz it and its Big Brother the 290x often runs into thermal limits causing
clock speeds and voltage to scale down so they don't actually run at the speeds
on the Box in games this throttling Behavior could be blamed on a couple of
things one of them is the high heat output of the Hawaii GPU with its mass
6 billion transistors the other is the lackluster reference cooler with its
loud fan that forces end users to choose
between hairdryer like noise or throttled performance now whatever you
want to blame it on there were a few things that were very clear number one
is that the r9290 already performed very
well against the GTX 780 which prompted NVIDIA to drop prices only down to 500
mind you but it was a drop number two is that we won't have a clear idea of what
the card is truly capable of until until we get better coolers in the form of
twin frozer or direct cu2 class coolers from guys like MSI and ASUS even with
custom a cooling though we'd have no way to know for sure whether any thermal
throttling was occurring we've observed both good and bad things about NVIDIA's
GPU Boost 2.0 which is similar to AMD's power tune a good thing about it is that
unlike AMD they provide a base clock so
you'll have a reference point for the minimum performance you'll be getting if
you buy the card one bad thing we've noticed however is that while GPU Boost
2.0 provides enduser customization and
allows you to change your thermal limit manually for example from 80° to 95° it
seems to be actually just doing whatever it wants in the background
so yeah you can change it but it's just
throttling anyway so we wanted to remove all possibility of thermal throttling
and liquid cool the cards fortunately we
contacted klance who hooked us up not only with a water block that fits on
either the R9 290 or the 290x you can check the link in the video description
for pricing and availability of the gear we used in this video but also a GTX 780
block a pump a reservoir and some awesome awesome quick disconnect
fittings that let us do very fast graphics card swaps on our first ever
liquid cooled test bench in fact guys I just disconnected a tube here that's
completely full of water and we got no leakage whatsoever all right moving on
to the test we used the Maximus 5 formul with a 3770k at 3.9 GHz 8 gigs of DDR3
memory at 1600 MHz and a PC power and cooling 1200 W power supply as always
our graphics cards were overclocked as high as they could go on both air and
water and we used two separate liquid cooling Loops for the CPU and for the
graphics card so we could isolate the heat generated by the GPU so we could
remove variables when evaluating them in terms of their thermal performance if
you guys want to see the clock speeds we were running at on the graphics cards
there will be a link to our chart in the video description below our results
surprised us a lot uh we were like everyone on the entire internet
expecting the r9290 to overclock like a beast and destroy the 780 out of which
we were expecting only a mild performance Improvement now because we
traditionally set our 780 to 95° on the
thermal limit for an apples to Apple's comparison against AMD cards and it only
ever runs at 80° we assumed that there was no additional head room to unlock
with better cooling because we were never hitting our userdefined thermal
limits but it turns out that for liquid
cooling enthusiasts NVIDIA's monkey business with the user adjustable
thermal limits turns into some pretty good performance gains for that card
when it's running underwater as well so first up is thermal performance both
cards ran between 35 to 45° C underload
with the 780 being closer to 35 and the 290 being closer to 45 uh when it comes
to gaming performance we only really tested a couple games because what we
were looking for in this video was performance scaling from air to water so
a huge library of games wasn't really necessary what we found is that the max
overclocked performance of the GTX 780 improved by just under 10% and the max
overclock performance of the r9290 improved by about 7% that means that
basically when you're out there shopping and deciding between these two cards
with the intention of going water you can basically look add any performance
comparison chart and factor in another 5 to 10% for each when you're doing your
value analysis on the subject of value
and performance this video is a great example of why I don't talk about
pricing for products in my videos the r9290 launched at $400 which would have
made it a clear winner against the $500
gtx780 in this particular Showdown but
it now costs $500 too making it exactly the same price but with higher power
consumption and higher heat output so for the gamers out there the GTX 780
gets the nod from me at the moment but
there are things other than games and amds cards are well known to perform
incredibly well against their NVIDIA counterparts in some Computer
Applications one example of which being cryptocurrency Mining and folks are
buying up AMD graphics cards by the truckload for Bitcoin and Litecoin
Mining and that's been causing some serious changes to the retail pricing as
I outlined before so ultimately it'll be up to you the viewer to look at the
performance numbers then check out the values that we're showing you in terms
of what you can expect when overclocking then check out the links to the cards in
the video description and do the value calculation for yourself if you're
curious guys you can see the overclocked values for our graphics cards in the
Google Doc Linked In the video description remember that overclocking
is always a crapshoot and you may get a card that overclocks better than ours
you may get one that overclocks worse than ours and there's no guarantee for
any of that stuff so anyway guys I hope you enjoyed this video on the removal of
thermal limits from the r9290 and the gtx780 let us know in the comments if
the results surprised you or if they were what you expected like the video if
you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and not as always wow it's doing
really good up till there as always don't forget to subscribe to lonus Tech
tips