Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we're taking a good look at the Radeon r9 290 and this is actually my first AIB review sample of the Radeon r9 290 it was sent in by gigabyte it's the OSI model and as you can see it still working today it served me very well so yeah very nice graphics card that it was once quite a powerful graphics card back in 2013 it was selling for around $400 u.s. and yeah even at that price it was considered to be a real steal as it was coming up against much more expensive parts were Nvidia and this was delivering similar levels of performance it was later refreshed I think in 2015 with twice as much RAM as the r9 390 and the MSRP was dropped to thrown or $30.00 u.s. so that sounds pretty good but timing wise it wasn't great because the 290s was selling for less than that and the extra vram wasn't particularly useful the time so it was kind of an unwelcomed product though the three 90s did prove to be rather worthwhile I suppose down the track anyway that was the second generation GC and architectures last outing and by late 2016 it was no more at least as far as the brand new market was concerned there are still plenty of these six year old GPUs kicking around as they are still quite capable after all it is a 250 watt part packing two thousand five hundred and sixty cause and the gigabyte OSI model that we have on hand comes clocked at 1040 megahertz the r9 290 also packs a very wide 512 bit memory bus along with five gigabits per second gddr5 memory and this allows for a peak bandwidth of 320 gigabytes per second roughly the same bandwidth as the r-tx 2060 for example so it should still be able to tackle the latest games with relative ease and that's what we look at today for this one I'll be looking closely at performance at 1080p in about a dozen titles and then we'll jump to a 33 game breakdown comparing the r9 290 and rx 570 head-to-head the test system used includes the core I 999 hurricane clocked at 5 gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3,200 memory as for the drivers we used a in 2019 edition nineteen point two point three for the radeon gpus and game ready for 1935 wh twelfth the GeForce GPUs okay time for some benchmark results first up we have apex legends and for gaming at 1080p the Radeon r9 290 still has what it takes delivering over 60 FPS on average with a one percenter low of 53 fps so very playable performance this place the r9 290 on par with the GTX 1063 gigabyte and just behind the radiant rx 570 again very respectable performance from the now six year old GPU moving on to the division 2 and here the r9 - honey was again able to deliver playable performance and while it did fall short of 60fps with the ultra quality preset it was still able to match the rx 570 and GTX 1060 so really not a bad result at all frame rates and shut off the Tomb Raider were quite impressive here the old 290 beat the six gigabyte 1060 while falling just shy of the Radeon rx 580 again it did just fall short of averaging 60 FPS but even so the resulting performance was still very playable Forza horizon for does a good job of leveraging the more recent versions of AMD's GC and architecture and we've seen that we're comparing the fifth gen Vega parts to Pascal ensuring that said the fourth gen rx 570 is considerably better than the second gen r9 290 providing 18% more frames on average that's a pretty big performance improvement for the RX 570 and it'll be pretty interesting to see if there are many or any other games to show these kinds of improvements next up we have hitman two and here they are known 290 RX 570 are basically delivering identical performance the 290 did fall short of 60 FPS on average but with the same 51 FPS 1% lowers Eric's 570 the experience was basically identical the a9 290 did struggle a little in just calls for with just 46 FPS on average that said while it did fall just short of the RX v 7t and three gigabyte 10 60 s average frame rate 1% low was actually slightly stronger overall performance was decent certainly playable but ideally you will want to turn down the visual settings for slightly better frames we we have Resident Evil 2 and here the r9 290 was very playable at 1080p using the maximum in-game quality settings averaging 72 fps this did place it a little bit behind the RX 570 but it did manage to match the gtx 1066 gigabyte as you might have expected the r9 290 does rather well in fortnight averaging 74 FPS with the epic quality settings enabled this placed it on par with the RX 517 while this did make it a good bit slower than the RX 580 in gtx 1060 in this title it really doesn't matter too much for those playing at 1080p frame rates in Metro Exodus weren't great it has to be said and with just shy of 40 fps on average didn't match the rx 570 but like I said overall performance wasn't great and you'll certainly want to dial back the quality settings a little the iodine 290 was ever so slightly down on the RX 570 in Rainbow six siege and while this MANET was able to deliver playable performance for a smoother experience you will want to turn down some quality settings and turning something down like the render scale with TA enabled will solve the issue pretty easily battlefield 5 was also playable using the old r9 290 in this time was roughly on path the RX 570 and that's something we've seen quite a bit of now it seems as though for r9 290 owners you really need something like an RT X 2060 or Vega 56 to be a worthwhile upgrade now the second last game that we're gonna look closely at is World of Tanks and here the r9 290 average 74 FPS to match the RX 570 exactly with over 60 FPS for the most part performance was very smooth and for those playing at 1080p I'd say the r9 290 still provides ample frames and last up we have Far Cry nude on here the r9 290 average 70 FPS allowing it to match the GTX 1063 gear button our x5 70 for this title 70 FPS on average with a 1% load of 60 FPS is perfect and for those who possess a 144 Hertz display will no doubt what more those making do if six-year-old tech will be very satisfied of course one of the downsides to using old hardware is power consumption and by today's standards the Unown 290 isn't exactly efficient or at least it isn't very efficient after all this is a 250 watt TDP GPU delivering similar performance to an rx 570 a 150 watt TDP part this meant for roughly the same performance total system consumption increase by 32% with the r9 290 so that's not great but a decent 600 or 700 watt power supply will have your covered okay so there you have it the Radeon r9 290 in 2019 though so far we have only looked at 13 of the 33 games that I tested did that despair you having to go over the other 20 titles that would have taken quite some time so we're just going to jump to one of those head-to-head comparison graphs and we'll check one of those out in a moment also please note for any of you wanting to check out results for other games pray warframe and well the other 18 games that we didn't look at you can do so for free on our patreon page so the link for that will be in the video description anyway I think it's about time we jumped over and had a look at the 290 head-to-head with the RX 570 this is pretty much what we were expecting to see based on the 13 game sample we just looked at the Radeon r9 290 was just 2% slower on average when compared to the rx 570 but we do see a few games where it was slower by a 7% margin or greater likewise we also see a few examples where it was faster by a 7 percent margin or greater for me the Wolfenstein results aren't that surprising this volcán based title is really good at utilizing many cores and with the r9 290 packing 25% more cores and 43% more bandwidth it's technically the more powerful GPU when properly utilized granted it doesn't clot quite as high but when comparing AIB models the clock speed deficit isn't that huge still there are examples of modern games that do take advantage of the more up-to-date GCN architecture and we certainly see this with titles such as Falls on horizon 4 as well as a few others but to a slightly lesser degree so in short the Radeon r9 290 is very similar to the rx 570 in terms of performance though you don't want to just assume they'll always deliver comparable formats as the margin can be as large as 20% that said if you're in the market for a new graphics card and I don't mean brand new just new to you and you have her hand $100 to spend give or take let's say $30 and what should you buy around $130 you can snag a brand new rx 570 meanwhile for around $80 us you can get your grubby mitts on a secondhand r9 290 and that appears to be the average selling price on eBay right now earlier in the year when I made our mega used graphics card guide I found the r9 290 to be one of the best value second-hand deals coming out at a cost of 74 cents per frame a secondhand rx 570 cost 87 cents per frame as they were typically selling for $94 us today they're the average selling price of an RX 570 eBay is more like $60 and that makes it the obvious choice for bargain hunters but ignoring secondhand rx 570s for a moment I still feel as they're a brand new rx 570 is a better deal than a secondhand r9 290 for me saving $50 really isn't worth it again these are six year old graphics cards with no warranty and you can safely assume most of them have had a pretty tough life so unless you're getting an r9 290 for I don't know I reckon probably $40 or less then I'd personally pass on it I know that really isn't a lot it is a pretty awesome graphics card for $40 but when you wipe your options that sort of price for me makes sense now let's reverse the situation though what if you have an r 9 290 and you're looking to upgrade what is the best solution available right now I'd say it would have to either be the gtx 1660 TI r TX 2060 or Vega 56 it really just depends on pricing in your region there is the occasional Vega 56 graphics card available at a killer price but you have to be a bit lucky with timing on those still if you can get Vega 56 for 350 dollars then it's certainly worth considering and under $300 it really is a must short of that though we have the r-tx 2060 at $250 and the gtx 1660 TI at 280 dollars if you bought the r9 290 knew all those years ago then you would have spent around $400 u.s. so assuming you're willing to spend around that much again something like the RT X 2060 really is a nice fit that said I'd be very tempted to grab a gtx 1660 TI for just $280 u.s. they offer a lot of value at that price wrapping things up I think it's fair to say that with a few minor tweaks to the visual settings that the Radeon r9 290 is still very usable today and well that's good news for those of you with older graphics cards hoping to upgrade to one of these and that said if you are you will have to get it very cheap for it to make sense so cheaper than the average selling price on eBay so keep that in mind also for those of you using a 290 and wanting to upgrade to something else there are quite a few options available and they all cost less than what you would have spent four to six years ago on one of these so yeah that's good news I suppose anyway I think that's probably going to do it for this one I hope you enjoyed the benchmarks and remember you can jump over to our patreon page for all 33 graphs if you want to take a closer look at any of the games tested thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time