Thread: AMD R9 290 Inbound!

I've been hearing some bad things about the R290(x)'s temperatures and throttling..... I am also interested to know how it does.

Any updates?

BF4 frames, temps ect.?

Did she done blow up real good?

Sorry about not coming back to this. So... I am on the fence. The card is CRAZY loud. If you play with headphones on, then great, but we were playing Metro Last Light on very high quality w/ DX11 and while FPS was fantastic, the noise from the fan was simply too much to simply ignore when playing Metro. We were getting approx 90-100 FPS.

For BF4, we were seeing FPS between 80-90 on Ultra settings. Again, that fan was spinning pretty much at max during the entire gaming session. My recommendation was to return the card and get the slower, yet quieter GTX 770, but that decision is not up to me. It is a fantastic card in terms of performance for $399, but I would pay more for a card that doesn't annoy me so much.

That being said, my $250 GTX 760 in my living room is nice and quiet and still runs games at 1080p just fine. The GTX 770 is a pretty substantial upgrade from the GTX 760, so in my own experience with the NVIDIA cards, my friend would probably not even notice the slight drops in FPS by changing his 290 to the 770.

Perhaps an Accelero from Arctic is the solution for these cards? Kinda eliminates their price advantage though.

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Just use headphones, ya big pussy. Tell your friend that, too.

EDIT:
I have a 6950, and it's always been loud.

I'd wager that the DirectCu cooler from Asus or Twin Frozr from MSI, if they can be adapted to work with the 290, might make a difference from a sound standpoint, but I've not seen anything about release dates on those yet.

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Originally Posted by Guyver

Just use headphones, ya big pussy. Tell your friend that, too.

EDIT:
I have a 6950, and it's always been loud.

I can't really support that statement. I don't use headphones when playing most single player games. I have nice speakers. I use them. They sound great.

Trigger pulled. R9 280X now inbound to the dex compound.
Newegg.com - ASUS R9280X-DC2T-3GD5 Radeon R9 280X 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

BF4 is the only benchmark I care about. This one should be quiet and able to run everything on Ultra. I may add another later, but for now it should be a decent upgrade from my 6950.

Nice, Dex! Those ASUS coolers are pretty good. A good friend of mine has the 7870 with that cooler design, and it is nice and quiet. It will be a decent bump up from the 6950. What are you doing with the old card?

Originally Posted by HeavyG

Nice, Dex! Those ASUS coolers are pretty good. A good friend of mine has the 7870 with that cooler design, and it is nice and quiet. It will be a decent bump up from the 6950. What are you doing with the old card?

Not sure yet. I'm going to keep it around for the next month or so (if I decide not to put it in my other machine) just in case it's needed, but from there I haven't decided.

I'll also likely be getting another 280x (same card) in a month or so and crossfire them. If one can hold a steady 60-70 frames (especially when Mantle is patched in to BF4), two should easily keep me at 80-100 without strain and without turning the rest of my machine into a space heater/ wind tunnel. At $300 each, you get quite a bit of bang for the buck, and I didn't feel like waiting for the ASUS Du coolers to come out for the 290's (which will make them MUCH quieter).