MSI R9 290X Lightning Video Card - The Best 290X We've Tested
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,555 words · ~7 min read
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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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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