Legit Reviews

We often get asked by readers what the best video card is for gaming on a single 4K display or an NVIDIA Surround or AMD Eyefinity multi-display setup. We addressed this question in October with a look at the just released AMD Radeon R9 290X versus the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 on our Sharp PN-K321 32″ 4K Ultra HD Monitor at 3840 x 2160. A ton has changed over the past two months as both NVIDIA launched their new flagship card, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, and both AMD and NVIDIA have released new drivers that help improve gaming performance.



Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs AMD Radeon R9 290X at 4K Ultra HD
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/nvidia-gefo ... -hd_130055

Sorry if I missed it, but are you using uber or quiet mode for the 290X?

Relayer wrote:Sorry if I missed it, but are you using uber or quiet mode for the 290X?

No worries! It's on every chart on the AMD info, but I was using uber mode. It doesn't matter that much on my open air test bench as the room is constantly at around 18-20C, so the ambient temp isn't high enough for it to start throttling.

Well duh! I looked through the text and didn't see it. I never thought of looking at the charts, for some reason. Cheers!

It's just that a lot of sites are using quiet mode and then, on top of that, doing more like heating the case interiors, when testing. I've never seen so much effort put into making a product look bad as I have with the 290 cards.

Yeah and I've done that - http://www.legitreviews.com/amd-radeon- ... ail_129583

And I've shown what water cooling a 290X does - http://www.legitreviews.com/nzxt-kraken ... 90x_130344

There is hardly any performance variance with Uber mode, so you have to do all the testing in quiet mode to see the difference. I know another site just post up that breaking news yesterday, but my article stated that last month. The only difference between Uber and Quiet mode is the fan speed profile in the vBIOS. I'm not sure how many people are buying a $559 enthusiast graphics card and running it in quiet mode or putting a card of that caliber into a chassis with really bad airflow.

At the end of the day... I personally think AMD should just get rid of quiet mode as it's useless and gotten them a ton of bad press. Let users adjust the fan speed profile with AMD OverDrive in Catalyst Control Center, so if you want a quieter card at the cost of performance you can. Done deal.