Gadgetory

hey guys this is Dimitri with her ik Knox and welcome back to another view now we all know the main limitations with the reference 290x was it's cooler is aimed these power to manage to get the best out of the core as it capped at 94 degrees Celsius and everyone who was excited about aim DS come back and including myself we're seriously looking forward to the days when custom pork partners would jump on the Hawaii plane with hopes for a better cooler high quality components and consequently higher and consistent frequencies and that's exactly what we have here this is the r9 290x directs you to all claw condition from Asus giving the unstable nature of availability and pricing of these cards at the moment exactly how much these cards are to be retailing for is unknown but given the 550 dollar price tag for the reference 290x expect to pay the premium for the Asus the direct cu2 cooler is very popular even in the early days of its triple slot designs despite its now somewhat saggy form luckily with the new heatsink design dual slot form factor is the standard and the high-density fins allow for extreme cooling despite a smaller thin array this is also the first time we've seen a customizable card in terms of color as Asus includes both red and gold metallic stickers to be applied onto the shroud to go along with their current motherboard color schemes the card is 11.25 inches long and also a full inch taller than the reference card again because of this amazing cooler the aluminum heatsink underneath the shroud is only part of the equation of this very impressive cooler design there are total of five full copper heat pipes that are all making contact with the Hawaii core one of which is 10 millimeters that allows 40% better heat transfer compared to the other eight millimeter heat pipes another part of this cooling equation are the fans and notice they are different the rear fan is typical with vertical airflow directionality penetrating the heatsink and moving the hot air towards the front fan where the wide angle blade design actually channels the airflow through the backplate and thus dissipating the heat a Seuss also made sure to include an additional rear aluminum heatsink that not only makes the car look awesome when installed but it will improve PCB heat dissipation the card is powered through six plus eight power design has the usual silent and uber mode switch and an ROG connect port to be used with supporting ASUS motherboards for voltage control and monitoring connectivity wise we get dual DVI HDMI and DisplayPort just like on the reference card now here is my monster triple slot 570 that over the years has made its Aggie appearance on our case reviews and to prolong the longevity of the 290x as the heatsink and the card is actually pretty heavy Asus has cleverly installed a metal support bracket that will prevent the sagginess from happening and aside from very impressive cooler design this card incorporates better components of what Asus calls super alloy power this means better quality capacitators MOSFETs and chokes that all equate for better performance improved temperatures and most importantly prolonging the lifespan of the card and with all that said the clock speeds have been bumped up to 10 50 megahertz only a 50 megahertz delta from the reference while memory has been bumped to 5400 megahertz the main issue with the reference card aside from the noise and temperatures was inconsistent frequencies as the card struggled to maintain that one gigahertz mark over a long session in both the silent and uber modes and this has been solved with the Asus card as you can see the frequencies are almost static resulting in not only higher but consistent frame rate and so with that said let's take a look at the benchmarks one thing to notice is the consistently higher FPS result compared to the reference design and also the silent mode on the Asus card always beats to Ober mode on the reference and then a few titles the Asus 290x is neck to neck with the monster 780ti that is significantly more expensive and with the benchmarks out of the way let's see how the directs you to cooler performed against the stock 290x cooler as you can see the reference card quickly capped at 94 degrees Celsius threshold while the AC is 290 X in both modes operated at much lower temperatures and looking at the bigger picture here the maximum 78 degrees Celsius in performance mode is absolutely impressive considering the Hawaii core is fully utilized to its full 10 50 megahertz potential and hats off to a SUSE for cooling the hottest core since the Fermi now what's more impressive is the acoustic performance of the fans in either mode sitting in the middle of the pile the Asus 290 X is a silent card with the two fans working amazingly well to deliver both cool and quiet operation this of course is still a power-hungry card based on the slightly higher and consistent frequencies a higher wattage consumption is expected of course given the performance output and with such an amazing cooler throw it seems there's a bit more frames to be squeezed out as temperatures are no longer an issue really and we were able to get an additional 14% overclock to 1.2 gigahertz on the core and over 6,000 megahertz on the memory this is at 60% fan speed which means there's still more left in the tank when it comes to overclocking and AMD has allowed its board partners the flexibility for voltage boosts revealing the an tapped or soon to be tapped true power potential of these custom 290x cards and as we finish up with the overview there are so many great things about the card starting with the amazingly effective cooler to dissipate heat away from the how I core in order for the power tune to maintain those frequencies stable without fluctuations this in turn causes very impressive frame results while staying both cool relative to the reference design and extremely quiet thanks to the clever fan design we're just hoping the 570 price tag can actually be reality for the consumers as worldwide markup of AMD cards have inflated the price of the r9 series due to rising popularity of the cryptocurrency mining now it seems like all the shortfalls of the reference card have been addressed with this Asus direct see you to 290x and I'm very pleased with the results especially since it's considerably cheaper than a 780ti yet proving to be just as powerful and deserves the damn good and damn good value award as asus has tapped into the potential of the hawaii core that makes a m-- d cards that much more attractive and while this concludes our view of the asus r9 290x direct see to overclock edition don't forget to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one