Gadgetory

hey guys this is Dimitri with hurricane axe and welcome back to another review now we're going to take a look today at the highly anticipated flagship graphics card from AMD this is the AMD Radeon r9 290x now earlier rumors have stirred up the hype for this being the Titan killer so let's find out if the 290x lives up to the rumored expectations now first of all aim DS pricing on the new our Series GPUs is extremely competitive and many gamers and enthusiasts alike will find aim DS aggressive pricing strategy pretty beneficial as the 290x is released at 549 dollars this is $100 cheaper than nvidia gtx 780 and almost half the cost of the titan this is a huge game changer in the industry and we're going to have to wait to see what type of price drops are to a cure from the greenside if any but this is also a huge step for AMD given now we have a card that not only outperforms the Titan but also it's significantly cheaper than the competition and aside from extremely competitive price point the r9 290x incorporates all the latest technologies from AMD including mantle true audio DirectX 11 point 2 and then updated power to an engine all features in sort of their infancy stages at the moment and only time will tell with revealing their true benefits now compared to the rest of the lineup the 290x has at 2,816 stream processors with 176 texture units which one compared to the HD 7970 gigahertz Edition in theory means about 40% increase in processing power it features four gigabytes of gddr5 memory for high resolution crunching with a 512 bit memory bus for that 4k that's been slowly penetrating the market base clock of 850 megahertz with potential of reaching the one gigahertz mark which is absolutely highest the r9 290x will reach given its thermal and power conditions also this is a power-hungry card despite a m-- these claims of TDP to be around 250 watts now this reference design is good-looking with the Radeon branding and the red stripes no glowing logos here unfortunately this is a blow style cooler with integrated intake ventilation around the back of the card that would certainly come in useful in tight crossfire situations and notice there are no cross 5 fingers and what the AMD has done here is incorporated a new hardware DMA engine for multi card interaction which carries benefits such as improved latencies and higher bandwidth over the PCI Express bus now despite the high waters draw the 290 X is powered through an 8 + 6 pin connector and feature a multitude of appropriate IO connectors for Eyefinity setups including two DVI ports an HDMI output and a display port with daisy chain support meaning you can run 6 displays out of this single card now the r9 290x includes a switch at the top where the crossfire fingers would be that allows the car to operate at either silent or uber mode with better cooling provided in the latter with 55% fan speed this consequently allows user flexibility for better performance or a more silent operation and the new power to an engine helps the car to maintain maximum utilization of the core provided there sufficient cooling now the car temperatures in either mode reach 94 degrees Celsius but the uber mode allows more Headroom for higher clock speeds because the heat is removed quicker and partying essentially helps to stabilize the clock speeds to an appropriate level based on thermal capacity of the core now this leaves the temptation for even better performance once non-reference cooler and eventually water blocks entered the market another exciting feature incorporated into the card is true audio which allows the GPU instead of the CPU to process audio elements in the game and therefore release the limited CPU resources assigned for audio this in terms helps game developers and helps to improve audio fidelity and detail with more resources allocated for audio processing from the GPU now the real big question here is how does it perform in games and looking at benchmarks the r9 290 eggs comes on top or just below the Titan in the uber mode while the silent mode allows the slightly lower clocks due to thermal capacity now for a car that's almost half the price of the Titan the results speak for themselves and this is an absolute powerhouse and brings an incredible price to performance ratio that many gamers will appreciate at $549 the compromise however here is threefold first is acoustics with this being the loudest card within the lineup for most gamers stoke would like to blast out the volume on their speakers or usually wear headphones this really shouldn't be a problem second are the temperatures with a 94 degrees Celsius threshold not only does this bring up concerns of life expectancy of the core due to such massive heat but you also have to take into account for the overall case temperatures this will affect and lastly the power draw of the 290x is incredibly high for a single core GPU the card is targeted for enthusiasts so it's not really an issue of having a weak power supply but your power bill will consequently be higher and that is just something to keep in mind and I would like to conclude by saying that AMD has introduced some serious competition to Nvidia that feature a lot of new tech like mantle trueaudio DirectX 11 point 2 capability and power tune to keep clock speeds in balance with the thermal threshold and consequently do all the heavy lifting on making sure the core is fully utilized we have the two modes silent and uber are beneficial for user preference and the capable performance out of this card is truly impressive given the price AMD has made it smooth and now I'm very eager to see how this will affect invidious pricing structure but of course we are dealing with louder operation higher and whirring temperatures and warping power consumption that all add up to one big pile of concerns but I still think that the 290x is a huge step for AMD that aims to acquire a larger chunk of the enthusiast market with incredibly aggressive pricing and tighten killing results and we're giving you the hard work NOx damn good and damn good value a word now what do you guys think of this move from AMD and what does this mean for the Titan leave your comments down below and to read the full in-depth review click on the first link in the description and we'll see you in the next one