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welcome to my unboxing and review of one of the most anticipated graphics card
launches in recent memory this is the r9
290x from AMD it is their new ultimate
performance flagship single GPU card it
features the same gcn architecture as the last gen 7000 series as well as the
wii u and the ps4 and the xbox one but
with some performance enhancements as well as some feature tweaks so let's
start with a quick rundown of the specs the GPU core inside here is clocked at
one gigahertz which considering that it is a fixed billion transistor GPU core
is nothing short of very very impressive it has four gigs of 512 bit gddr5 memory
it's got 2816 stream processors so yeah there's
more performance and it's four gigs of gddr5 memory are running on a 512-bit
bus meaning there is massive memory bandwidth and a ton of memory available
to it and there's a very good reason for that it is optimized for greater than hd
gaming compared to the last generation 7970 gigahertz edition it has twice the
pixel fill rate performance almost and nearly double the geometry performance
so that basically means it's made to take what the last gen could do which is
kind of two and a half k gaming amp it up a notch and deliver that kind of
performance at 4k resolutions on the
front of the card other than the upgraded industrial design there's not much to talk about other than this right
here the fan has been significantly altered versus previous generation
products so the fan profile the software that controls it is able to ramp up and
ramp down the speeds much more slowly making it sound less aggressive to your
ears this ties in very nicely with their new upgraded powertune technology so
think of it kind of like GPU boost 2.0 for AMD they're not really going to want
me to say that but let's face it so it's taking four pillars so that is voltage
clock speed power and temperature and then balancing
the performance of the GPU against all of those things in order to squeeze as
much performance as possible out of the graphics card now what AMD says is
unique about their implementation is that the voltage control is incredibly
granular and it can switch voltage steps
and around 10 microseconds meaning that it is always pushing to squeeze as much
perf as possible out of the card now power tune comes dialed in at 95 degrees
celsius however you know some folks are not necessarily comfortable with their
graphics card running at 95 degrees it'll run at that temperature all the time because of the way it's designed
don't worry power tune is fully customizable so if you decide you have a
different maximum fan speed you want or you have a different maximum temperature
you want to see it'll adjust all the other parameters so that is clock speed
therefore performance in order to keep in line with your expectations now
NVIDIA ships their cards dialed in at 80 degrees by default but it should be
noted that it was only a generation or two ago that NVIDIA was also saying it
was fine for gpus to run at 100 degrees flipping around to the top of the card
we find where the plastic shroud is joined to the metal unisync that
provides cooling for the RAM and vrm components we also find cross market no
no crossfire connectors AMD has tested the card in fact they left the contact
points on the pcb so that they could actually ghetto wire one up to make sure
that it doesn't make a difference and they tested it down to PCIe 8x two cards
running in 8x gen2 and saw no performance difference between putting
the connectors on and not putting the connectors on so the crossfire connector
is gone on this card we also find the power connector so there's an eight pin
PCIe and a six pin PCIe plug and finally ah yes the bioswitch has made a return
so by default it comes with uber and quiet fan profiles in two separate
bioses and you can flip between them as you want and by default the quiet mode
is closer to the i o panel so naturally we have gone and put it in uber mode on
the rear i o we find ventilation so this is a blower design card so while some
air is going to come out up here most of it's going to come out the back of the card and be exhausted from your case as
well as for all digital outputs all digital you
might say oh dvi to vga adapter no no adapter the analog signaling is not
there AMD has made some other tweaks to this though as well so check this out
two dvi ports one HDMI can't run ifinity off of those three ports whoa hey now
you can you can run three 1080p monitors off dvi dvi and HDMI you can still use
displayport for ifinity but it's totally up to you matching dvi monitors no big
deal an HDMI to dvi cable will take care of that with no conversion they've made
some changes to the way that they allocate resources in order to make that
possible which is very very cool displayport you can also get some
commercially available displayport hubs now which will allow you to easily run
six displays off of this card so there is no need for an ifinity 6 edition card
anymore now speaking of the HDMI port on the back AMD was the first to implement
sound over HDMI on their graphics cards a couple generations ago and they are
throwing another first at us with this card this is the second card on the
market to implement AMD's true audio technology so that is a programmable dsp
that is built right onto the card that is dedicated hardware just to process
audio that means lower CPU utilization
better surround effects less clutchy approximations of environmental effects
using reverb as well as generally more immersive sound it does rely on support
from middleware developers as well as from game developers so given that
there's only a couple cards in the market right now that support it maybe it's not going to be a huge thing yet
but in the future thumbs up AMD for implementing that
flipping over to the back of the card we've got the GPU itself so that's
clocked at up to 1 gigahertz and then we've also got yeah count them 16 memory
chips so AMD has opted to mount all of the memory on the front of the card
where it can be cooled by that unisync and because of its 512-bit memory
interface it actually needs 16 memory modules in order to function
so there you go guys quite the engineering feat cramming all of that in there while
we're back here i want to take a moment to talk about zerocore technology so
when your computer is idling and your screen turns off AMD cards can actually
almost completely turn off the graphics card so it uses almost no power we've
already seen this before but just a reminder guys zero core is a thing and
it does help save power if you're not the kind of person who always puts their
computer to sleep or turns it off when they're not using it next up we've got
mantle which is a potential game changer it's going to be supported by this card
and all gcn architecture cards it is a new API that allows more direct
communication between the game engine itself and the hardware inside your
graphics card rather than going through directx which is an intermediary layer
that doesn't allow for the same kind of bare metal programming for an individual
graphics card architecture it's not the same as a next-gen console even though
they use a gcn architecture but AMD is hoping that because of the similar
architectures some of the principles that developers are using to optimize on
those consoles can be used through mantle to get better performance on AMD
cards it'll rely heavily on developer support so battlefield 4 is going to
have mantle support coming in december and at their developer conference in
november 2013 we are expecting to see announcements from a lot of other
developers based on the the rumors that i've heard chirping around now before we
get into performance numbers i want to talk about overclocking we run all of
our cards overclocked and overclocking is very different on 290x so instead of
the traditional clock speed slider and fan speed slider now you set a maximum
fan speed and you have a little heat map
grid within AMD's overdrive utility that allows you to see how the settings
you're applying and it's a percentage based overclock now not a clock speed
based overclock affect both the clock speed as well as the temperature and the
power targets and how all those things work together so you're going to want to
spend a little bit of time learning about that before you go and try and
overclock this card now for us we were running an uber mode we ran at 1080p and
then we did a special head-to-head battle between r9 290x and gtx 780 at
two and a half k however we don't have a 4k monitor at this time and AMD informs
me that the 290x doesn't really stretch its legs and show its metal until you
hook it up to a 4k display without further ado
off to you slick there has been a ton of anticipation over these numbers so i'm
just going to go right into it and something that a lot of people are going to notice right off the bat is that this
card is not actually topping our charts to explain we have been running our
graphics card tests for quite a while now with everything overclocked to the
wall and this test is no different we're running everything overclocked as much
as possible and we found that the 290x actually comes out of the box quite
aggressively clocked and there isn't a ton of headroom left now
we were interested when it started not being at the top of all our charts so i
did a little bit of investigation and when the 780 and 290x are both at stock
the 290x and the 780 often switch position the 290x is actually usually on
top but we run all of our tests overclocked so moving on another thing
to note is that this card is about 550 and a 780 is about 650
maybe give a few more depending on where you are now at about 20 cheaper in our
1080p benchmarks it's only 10 slower jumping to 2560 by 1440p we noticed
actually that the story got even sweeter at about only five percent loss in
performance that makes that whole price performance thing even better we were
seeing ten percent on 1080p and now we're only seeing five percent that's
great moving up to 4k it's supposed to be even better we unfortunately don't
have those numbers as we don't have a screen that can support that though
another thing to note is that with star citizen everything is kind of skewed
that game is not released yet that game is not optimized yet and
i kind of think it's gonna happen but mantle is not on it yet at all so those
three things will actually change the game a ton we just wanted to include it
because star citizen no actual real logical reason we just wanted to show
how it's performing right now just in case you're one of those guys that's going to jump on the hanger module
that's going to jump on dog fighting that's going to jump on everything in the future because you're a big follower
of star citizen and we know there is a ton of you out there if you like the
video like the video if you just like the video dislike the video and in the
comments below what are you going for are you going for that sensible price
per performance route or are you going for the hardcore i want to be at the top
of the charts with crazy amounts of overclocking and all that kind of stuff angle what is your angle and all as
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