AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB Video Card Review

[Apoptosis]

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is nearly two years old and if you calculate that in ‘gamer years’ it would be easily considered past its prime. Video cards don’t get better as they age, so you would think that this card would be obsolete by now. The funny thing is that the Radeon HD 7970 is still a very competitive graphics card and was just re-branded this month as the lower cost Radeon R9 280X at $299. The AMD Radeon HD 7950/7970 and even some of the Radeon HD 7870 cards were powered by the 28nm Tahiti GPU that had 2048 stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory in its full form. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 was designed in a time period where the largest resolution monitor available was 2560x1600, but now we have massive 4K Ultra HD monitors at 3840x2160 readily available and falling in price. In order to get more performance, AMD had to tape out an entirely new GPU called Hawaii for the Radeon R9 290X at the $549 price point. Read on to see how it performs!



Article Title: AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon- ... iew_126806

[Apoptosis]

The XFX Radeon R9 290X Battlefield 4 Edition Card is $579.99 at newegg as promised - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814150675

[sbohdan]

No way I would use this card @ 95C and feel comfortable. I would slap a WC block on it or just wait for Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS to have their version with a REAL cooling solution. That said, it is a shame for AMD, that thay can't come up with decent cooling (even using a third party product) to cool their top offering. Mumbling about 95C being OK is just plain pathetic. That said, the performance is awesome and AMD seems to have now something to break Nvidia's rule

[Apoptosis]

No way I would use this card @ 95C and feel comfortable. I would slap a WC block on it or just wait for Gigabyte, MSI, ASUS to have their version with a REAL cooling solution. That said, it is a shame for AMD, that thay can't come up with decent cooling (even using a third party product) to cool their top offering. Mumbling about 95C being OK is just plain pathetic. That said, the performance is awesome and AMD seems to have now something to break Nvidia's rule

I felt the same thing at first, but after using it for over a week you get used to it. Like I noted in the conclusion I can't wait for AIB cards to see how this card acts with proper cooling. I also heard a rumor that some companies are working on a 1.2GHz version of this card, which would be insane.