Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed for today's video we are revisiting an old friend ahem DS radeon r9 290 hard to believe it's four years old now of course a lot has happened in that time but I can still recall testing the 290 for the first time like it was yesterday AMD handed me what was at the time a very aggressive looking graphics card back in October of 2013 and having been hugely impressed with their Kepler based Titan crusher for 290x just weeks prior I was keen to see what their much more affordable 290 had to offer in short AMD did end up cutting their lunch a bit on that one as they usually do they went after large volume sales rather than large profit margins and I guess that's why most enthusiasts love AMD in summary the 290 X and it's 550 dollar US MSRP was already considered to be shockingly low at the time it was 15% cheaper than the GTX 780 despite being 10% faster in addition to costing 45% less than the GTX Titan that right there looked to be a solid win for AMD yet despite that just week later they drop to the 290 which consequently dropped the 290 X from the wish list of MOS enthusiasts the unknown 290 came in an MSRP of just $400 US making it 27% more affordable than the 290x that made a fantastic W when you consider the r9 290 should never be more than 9 percent slower than the r9 290x in fact it was on average just 5 percent slower according to my own testing so in a sense the r9 290 made the r9 290x redundant much like the GTX 780 did - the Kepler based GTX Titan as good as the 290 was it wasn't without a few shortcomings IMD's new 290 series ran very hot hitting temperatures as high as 95 degrees after just a few minutes of gaming naturally this caused the cards fans to spin up and if they couldn't deal with the thermal load the cards throttles and this means they down clock themselves to reduce the thermal output that consequently reduced performance at the same time this issue was mostly solved by the board partner cards and a good example of such a card is the gigabyte are known to 9 Oh see that I have on hand gigabytes massive wind force 3x jewel slot cooler was capable of dissipating up to 450 watts of heat so back in 2013 the r9 290 went on sale for the then low price of $400 u.s. now four years later they can typically be purchased on the second-hand market for around 150 to 200 dollars u.s. the question is though should you purchase one for that price and how well does it handle today's games well in an effort to find out we'll be taking gigabytes model and throwing a dozen games at it testing will take place at the 1080p resolution using high to ultra higher quality settings four six or twelve games tested we do have hard data which can be compared to similar new graphics cards while we just showing gameplay for the other six games please note the gameplay footage shown was recorded using a capture card on AMD Verizon v 1400 test system overclocked to four gigahertz meanwhile the data you see in the graphs was recorded using the cable eight core i7 77 Eric a test system clocked at 4.9 gigahertz apart from the use of different hardware there is also joining the graphs and actual gameplay footage can't be directly compared as different quality settings were often used while different sections of the games were also used for testing keeping that in mind let's move on to see what we found first up we have battlefield 1 and here the r9 290 was good for an average of 80 FPS at 1080p using the ultra quality preset that's a seriously impressive result and it meant the 290 was still quicker than the RX 470 and GTX 970 if only by slim margin it crushed the war budget focused gtx 1050 Ti and wasn't a great deal slow in the GTX 1063 gigabyte and rx 484 gigabyte graphics cards moving to actual multiplayer through John the Rison v 1400 test system we see the frame rate top at somewhere between 65 and 75 FPS for the most part let's watch a little more battle till one action before moving on enemy team is in the lead the r9 290 does struggle a little in Mass Effect Andromeda using the ultra quality preset though with an average of 45 FPS the game while still playable still the r9 290 does trail the RX 470 in this style that was still a good bit faster than the GTX 750 Ti as you would expect given it is a much larger GPU that consumes much more power anyway moving on to the single-player footage on the horizon v 1400 test system I reduce the quality settings to the higher preset frame rates did still dip as low as 45 fps though this was previously the average frame rate and the average is now 55 FPS which did allow for a smoother experience and you fucked up use the job jet to be happy and celebrate we could rather fool again seek my life give it a minute we can probably do both I'd make that fight here I was a cop in crisis response yeah how'd you over a beer sometime testing with overwatch saw the r9 290 match the RX 470 and come in just behind the eye rx 484 gigabyte so a decent result remember testing done here was recorded on the core i7 77 RK clocked at 4.9 gigahertz so the footage you're about to see using the much cheaper Rison v 1400 won't be seeing the same frame rates anyway let's move on and check out some multiplayer footage which I recorded with me running around as soldier 76 I don't play overwatch so I'm not the best sadly I just don't have time to play games at the moment anyway as you can see frame rates are a bit lower in this multiplayer test using the Rison v 1400 clocked at 4 gigahertz still we did see an average of 110 FPS and this is still a very respectable result and obviously the game was very playable and extremely smooth goodbye break I've got you in my eye using the core i7 7700 key test system the r9 290 did very well in rise of the Tomb Raider rendering 91 FPS on average this placed it alongside the GTX 970 GTX 1063 gigabyte rx 480 and well ahead of the RX 470 moving on we have some gameplay footage from a much more demanding section of the game called geothermal Valley even so the r9 290 was able to push over 60 FPS for the most part and again gameplay was very smooth the division is a very demanding title with the ultra quality preset enabled here the r9 290 average is 53 FPS but at times did dip as low as 31 fps this placed it on par with the GTX 970 which is a solid result despite trailing the newer mid-range GPUs since the ultra quality presets seem to be a bit much I have downgraded to the higher quality preset and this made a huge amount of difference in game frame rates now remained above 70 fps and where for the most part seen hovering between 80 and 90 fps so another impressive result for the r9 290 maxed out the UH nine to ninety was very competitive in titanfall two with an average of 83 FPS which placed it on par with the EVGA GTX 1060 for the wind plus model along with the rx 470 the 290 never dipped below 60 FPS so performance was very smooth as you're about to see the previous results were based on the single-player portion of the game which surprisingly seems to be more visually demanding than this multiplayer map so the most part frame rates did stay above 100 FPS though at times did briefly drop down to 80 fps overall a very smooth and satisfying gaming experience was hard with the 290 in titanfall 2 wrapping up the testing here is six more games I quickly looked at they include warframe Ghost Recon wildlands The Witcher 3 dawn of war free csgo and prey reinforcements we need that a channel Teno you cannot survive without arming yourself choose a weapon before we continue I'm not sure what Bohr has done to your warframe yes creates element occitan any magic ones are cheeky gear off today tomorrow I'm lollygagging two of you I keep it safe scout Marines employing blight grenade when favorite Hey an example to the rest repositioning with me Scout buries chapter master to battle barks dauntless I required a tactical marine squad drop to my position incendiary Blake couch MOOC content eerie throwing fire tract of alien material as you might have noticed when watching the gameplay food for the gigabyte r9 290 it still runs quite hot at around 80 to 84 degrees that said the card was very quiet the entire time and couldn't be heard over the case fans which are also very quiet also that temperature means that it's at least 11 degrees off the throttle temperature so performance isn't going to be compromised the reason the r9 290 is a bit of a hot item other than the price is down to the power consumption here we see total system consumption what's 50 Watts higher when compared to the GTX 970 in the same system the system of course was our core i7 7700 a week which again is overclocked to 4.9 G goats so overall consuming just 321 watts is hardly extreme for what is otherwise a high-end system that said you can save 100 watts by going with the GTX 1060 for example overall the r9 290 offered game is a serious bang for their buck four years ago when it was first released and we find today little has changed for those wanting to build a new rising system for as little as possible with the r5 1400 they could look to the r9 290 as a possible pickup adding that GPU infra red $150 us would be an awesome pairing for the hundred and seventy dollar CPU and you'll end up with a very capable 1080p gamer comparing a second-hand r9 290 to a current generation GPU with a similar price tag you'd be looking at something like the GTX 1050 Ti and as you just saw the performance on the four-year-old model is considerably better that said though you are paying for the performance in the form of extra power consumption that I feel for most gamers this won't really be an issue anyway let me know what you think of the r9 290 I can't wait to see all those fine wine comments seriously though the r9 290 has aged very well and it's a great value option in my opinion I'm no slave they again suing guys