Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with a review of the brand new AMD radeon r9 290x so the question is has it stack up taking a look around the card you'll see this has the same nice looking design as other reference 200 series cards for display outs you'll find a pair of dual link DVI HDMI and DisplayPort and for power it needs an 8 & a 6 pin PCI II connector unlike the rest of the new AMD r7 + r9 cards this is a brand new GPU codenamed Hawaii which is really made to go head-to-head with the NVIDIA GTX 780 spec wise it features two thousand eight hundred and sixteen stream processors a clock speed of up to one gigahertz and four gigabytes of RAM with a 512 bit memory bus that 4 gigabytes of memory might sound like overkill but the 290x is designed to game at up to 4k resolutions at AMD's GPU 14 event I was able to play around on a system with a pair of 290 X's and crossfire on three 4k monitors playing dirt3 and it was really impressive unfortunately I don't quite have a pile of money to go spend on a 4k monitor for testing however the 290x definitely is designed for some really crazy setups so with a new card comes a new way to control your fan and overclocking the BIOS switch on the card goes between quiet and uber mode which capture max fan speed at either 40% or 55% quiet mode hits a good balance between performance and noise where uber mode is a lot louder but works well especially if you're overclocking to overclock instead of dialing in a specific speed you instead bump up the max speed that's available to the card and it will run as close to that as possible I was able to push the 290x in uber mode to 1095 megahertz on the core and 1310 megahertz on the memory which is just under 10% and 5% respectively with a better cooler and cranking the fan higher I'm sure I could have gotten more on the flip side you can also use these same controls to make the graphics card run cooler and quieter you can now set a max temperature which is 95 degrees Celsius that default something AMD says is totally safe for the card and you can also adjust the maximum fan speed manually what this means is that you can customize the 290x for you so if you don't mind giving up a little bit of performance you can let the card run much cooler and quieter on the flip side if you don't mind about noise and give it a little bit more power you can also get more performance out of it crossfire has also been revamped on the 290 X as you no longer have any external connectors instead everything is done through the motherboard which could also improve crossfire performance in theory however unfortunately I only have a single 290 X so I'll have to test this later trueaudio is also including the card which should help improve audio performance however this is more of a future-proof thing than something that you can actually really use right now so let's jump right on in and take a look at the benchmarks so the Radeon r9 290x is an absolute beast especially considering the $550 price tag even on quiet mode it outperforms the GTX 780 and it does it for $100 less it's really this simple if you're looking for a high-end graphics card the 290x nails it of course Nvidia is going to be striking back soon with the new 780 Ti so what do you guys think are you going for a 290x are you gonna hold off for a little while longer definitely be sure to let me know what you think in the comments below anyway guys thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel so you're always kept up to date with the latest and greatest anyway guys I will catch you next time