Reviews - Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X WindForce OC

[HEXUS]

AMD's finest gets the WindForce OC treatment.

Read more.

[Percy1983]

I will say I have the windforce 7950 and the cooler is amazing, would interested to see how this would go on a 290.

[stereo55]

Sorry , but even WITH the excellent cooler its not going to help since the price is overly inflated atm . Amd is going to keep shooting itself if does not get a handle on pricing and availability . By the time Amd does correct the situation it probably will be too little too late and they will have already lost their market share to the Ti (at the going price) .

*edited: Its a shame too , as I was (fairly) interested and willing to give Amd a nice try again (even at retail pricing) after years of Nvidia ; but not even going there with the current inflated market price . Guess I'll just keep my 780 for now .

Thx for the review Hexus.

[clovy]

This product is great, but i concern with the price..

[Agrippa]

To be honest, the most striking thing about this review and the included graphs is how close the Sapphire 290 Tri-X comes in terms of performance and for a fair bit less money. I'm sure the 290X will become a better and better deal as time rolls on, but for now there's no way I'd buy one. That 290 Tri-X however....

[Butuz]

It looks to be a good cooler - one thing to note is, you don't really need to keep the R290/X at 75 degrees as it's designed to run in the 90s and the VRMS run cooler than the 79x0 series. I would use MSI Afterburner to create a custom fan profile to keep the card at about 80-85 degrees and lower the noise considerably. It suddenly becomes a winner on your benchmarks at 85 degrees and (my estimate) ~38db.

Be interesting if hexus could try it out and add it to the review!!

[roki977]

290x with current prices is not good deal. There is whole range of factory overclocked 780s that are fast as it if not faster, cooler, more quiet and less expensive. Miners totally ruined 290 GPUs. Mantle wont help either exp. in BF4 but thats only one game and who knows what and when follows..

[kalniel]

290x with current prices is not good deal. There is whole range of factory overclocked 780s that are fast as it if not faster, cooler, more quiet and less expensive.

Well not really - at higher resolutions the 290X really is a much much better card than an overclocked 780. But yes, the 780 can be quieter, if that's your primary concern.

Mantle wont help either exp. in BF4 but thats only one game

+thief
+star citizen
+Dragon Age: Inquisition
+mirrors edge
+future need for speed
+future mass effect
etc.

[kompukare]

It looks to be a good cooler - one thing to note is, you don't really need to keep the R290/X at 75 degrees as it's designed to run in the 90s and the VRMS run cooler than the 79x0 series.

The power consumption should a bit worse at those higher temps though. 70-70C vs 90-95C can be around 30W or more. That's going by those DIY Arctic Cooling reviews done by HT4U.net and Tom's. But it is hard to see that with different custom reviews since

• a) it's not the same chip (Silicon lottery and ASIC quality has a big bearing on leakage current etc.
• b) it's not the same card (look at the recent discussion on motherboard power consumption figures in the AMD - Piledriver chitchat thread: uk.hardware.info found the difference between the most efficient AM2+ board and the least efficient was 51W; or in other words at Cinebench 11.5 full load the worst board used 47% more.

Also, despite what AMD spec I would prefer not to run at those temperatures. While I do believe that AMD actually do proper testing (unlike Nvidia who messed up big time with their 65nm parts, aka bumpgate) I would still be more comfortable at 75-80C.