AMD Radeon R9 290X Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,215 words · ~11 min read
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the fractal design define r4 case gets featured on the WAN Show build logs of
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the week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it
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welcome to my unboxing and review of one of the most anticipated graphics card
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launches in recent memory this is the r9
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290x from AMD it is their new ultimate
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performance flagship single GPU card it
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features the same gcn architecture as the last gen 7000 series as well as the
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wii u and the ps4 and the xbox one but
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with some performance enhancements as well as some feature tweaks so let's
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start with a quick rundown of the specs the GPU core inside here is clocked at
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one gigahertz which considering that it is a fixed billion transistor GPU core
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is nothing short of very very impressive it has four gigs of 512 bit gddr5 memory
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it's got 2816 stream processors so yeah there's
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more performance and it's four gigs of gddr5 memory are running on a 512-bit
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bus meaning there is massive memory bandwidth and a ton of memory available
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to it and there's a very good reason for that it is optimized for greater than hd
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gaming compared to the last generation 7970 gigahertz edition it has twice the
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pixel fill rate performance almost and nearly double the geometry performance
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so that basically means it's made to take what the last gen could do which is
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kind of two and a half k gaming amp it up a notch and deliver that kind of
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performance at 4k resolutions on the
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front of the card other than the upgraded industrial design there's not much to talk about other than this right
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here the fan has been significantly altered versus previous generation
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products so the fan profile the software that controls it is able to ramp up and
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ramp down the speeds much more slowly making it sound less aggressive to your
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ears this ties in very nicely with their new upgraded powertune technology so
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think of it kind of like GPU boost 2.0 for AMD they're not really going to want
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me to say that but let's face it so it's taking four pillars so that is voltage
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clock speed power and temperature and then balancing
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the performance of the GPU against all of those things in order to squeeze as
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much performance as possible out of the graphics card now what AMD says is
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unique about their implementation is that the voltage control is incredibly
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granular and it can switch voltage steps
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and around 10 microseconds meaning that it is always pushing to squeeze as much
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perf as possible out of the card now power tune comes dialed in at 95 degrees
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celsius however you know some folks are not necessarily comfortable with their
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graphics card running at 95 degrees it'll run at that temperature all the time because of the way it's designed
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don't worry power tune is fully customizable so if you decide you have a
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different maximum fan speed you want or you have a different maximum temperature
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you want to see it'll adjust all the other parameters so that is clock speed
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therefore performance in order to keep in line with your expectations now
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NVIDIA ships their cards dialed in at 80 degrees by default but it should be
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noted that it was only a generation or two ago that NVIDIA was also saying it
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was fine for gpus to run at 100 degrees flipping around to the top of the card
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we find where the plastic shroud is joined to the metal unisync that
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provides cooling for the RAM and vrm components we also find cross market no
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no crossfire connectors AMD has tested the card in fact they left the contact
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points on the pcb so that they could actually ghetto wire one up to make sure
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that it doesn't make a difference and they tested it down to PCIe 8x two cards
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running in 8x gen2 and saw no performance difference between putting
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the connectors on and not putting the connectors on so the crossfire connector
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is gone on this card we also find the power connector so there's an eight pin
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PCIe and a six pin PCIe plug and finally ah yes the bioswitch has made a return
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so by default it comes with uber and quiet fan profiles in two separate
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bioses and you can flip between them as you want and by default the quiet mode
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is closer to the i o panel so naturally we have gone and put it in uber mode on
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the rear i o we find ventilation so this is a blower design card so while some
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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
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well as for all digital outputs all digital you
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might say oh dvi to vga adapter no no adapter the analog signaling is not
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there AMD has made some other tweaks to this though as well so check this out
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two dvi ports one HDMI can't run ifinity off of those three ports whoa hey now
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you can you can run three 1080p monitors off dvi dvi and HDMI you can still use
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displayport for ifinity but it's totally up to you matching dvi monitors no big
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deal an HDMI to dvi cable will take care of that with no conversion they've made
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some changes to the way that they allocate resources in order to make that
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possible which is very very cool displayport you can also get some
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commercially available displayport hubs now which will allow you to easily run
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six displays off of this card so there is no need for an ifinity 6 edition card
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anymore now speaking of the HDMI port on the back AMD was the first to implement
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sound over HDMI on their graphics cards a couple generations ago and they are
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throwing another first at us with this card this is the second card on the
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market to implement AMD's true audio technology so that is a programmable dsp
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that is built right onto the card that is dedicated hardware just to process
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audio that means lower CPU utilization
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better surround effects less clutchy approximations of environmental effects
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using reverb as well as generally more immersive sound it does rely on support
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from middleware developers as well as from game developers so given that
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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
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but in the future thumbs up AMD for implementing that
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flipping over to the back of the card we've got the GPU itself so that's
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clocked at up to 1 gigahertz and then we've also got yeah count them 16 memory
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chips so AMD has opted to mount all of the memory on the front of the card
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where it can be cooled by that unisync and because of its 512-bit memory
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interface it actually needs 16 memory modules in order to function
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so there you go guys quite the engineering feat cramming all of that in there while
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we're back here i want to take a moment to talk about zerocore technology so
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when your computer is idling and your screen turns off AMD cards can actually
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almost completely turn off the graphics card so it uses almost no power we've
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already seen this before but just a reminder guys zero core is a thing and
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it does help save power if you're not the kind of person who always puts their
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computer to sleep or turns it off when they're not using it next up we've got
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mantle which is a potential game changer it's going to be supported by this card
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and all gcn architecture cards it is a new API that allows more direct
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communication between the game engine itself and the hardware inside your
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graphics card rather than going through directx which is an intermediary layer
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that doesn't allow for the same kind of bare metal programming for an individual
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graphics card architecture it's not the same as a next-gen console even though
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they use a gcn architecture but AMD is hoping that because of the similar
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architectures some of the principles that developers are using to optimize on
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those consoles can be used through mantle to get better performance on AMD
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cards it'll rely heavily on developer support so battlefield 4 is going to
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have mantle support coming in december and at their developer conference in
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november 2013 we are expecting to see announcements from a lot of other
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developers based on the the rumors that i've heard chirping around now before we
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get into performance numbers i want to talk about overclocking we run all of
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our cards overclocked and overclocking is very different on 290x so instead of
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the traditional clock speed slider and fan speed slider now you set a maximum
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fan speed and you have a little heat map
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grid within AMD's overdrive utility that allows you to see how the settings
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you're applying and it's a percentage based overclock now not a clock speed
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based overclock affect both the clock speed as well as the temperature and the
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power targets and how all those things work together so you're going to want to
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spend a little bit of time learning about that before you go and try and
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overclock this card now for us we were running an uber mode we ran at 1080p and
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then we did a special head-to-head battle between r9 290x and gtx 780 at
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two and a half k however we don't have a 4k monitor at this time and AMD informs
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me that the 290x doesn't really stretch its legs and show its metal until you
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hook it up to a 4k display without further ado
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off to you slick there has been a ton of anticipation over these numbers so i'm
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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
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card is not actually topping our charts to explain we have been running our
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graphics card tests for quite a while now with everything overclocked to the
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wall and this test is no different we're running everything overclocked as much
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as possible and we found that the 290x actually comes out of the box quite
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aggressively clocked and there isn't a ton of headroom left now
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we were interested when it started not being at the top of all our charts so i
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did a little bit of investigation and when the 780 and 290x are both at stock
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the 290x and the 780 often switch position the 290x is actually usually on
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top but we run all of our tests overclocked so moving on another thing
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to note is that this card is about 550 and a 780 is about 650
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maybe give a few more depending on where you are now at about 20 cheaper in our
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1080p benchmarks it's only 10 slower jumping to 2560 by 1440p we noticed
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actually that the story got even sweeter at about only five percent loss in
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performance that makes that whole price performance thing even better we were
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seeing ten percent on 1080p and now we're only seeing five percent that's
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great moving up to 4k it's supposed to be even better we unfortunately don't
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have those numbers as we don't have a screen that can support that though
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another thing to note is that with star citizen everything is kind of skewed
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that game is not released yet that game is not optimized yet and
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i kind of think it's gonna happen but mantle is not on it yet at all so those
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three things will actually change the game a ton we just wanted to include it
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because star citizen no actual real logical reason we just wanted to show
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how it's performing right now just in case you're one of those guys that's going to jump on the hanger module
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that's going to jump on dog fighting that's going to jump on everything in the future because you're a big follower
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of star citizen and we know there is a ton of you out there if you like the
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video like the video if you just like the video dislike the video and in the
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comments below what are you going for are you going for that sensible price
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per performance route or are you going for the hardcore i want to be at the top
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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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