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CES 2014 - PowerColor LCS 290X Water Cooled GPU - First Look!

2014-01-11
welcome to Jay's two cents exclusive insider coverage of CES 2014 our trip this year is brought to you by aqua tuning your global source for PC modding and cooling components and by Sennheiser the pursuit of perfect sound and of course by generous viewers like you so strapped in with Jays two cents as he takes you on a wild ride through CES 2014 hey guys Jays two cents here at CES 2014 continuing our exclusive insider coverage and I am here at the power color sweet checking out some really awesome graphics card so you guys may recognize this bad boy right here this is the 270x devil that has been out since around October to add some pretty neat features aftermarket cooling full-length PCB and of course this really awesome back plate but we're going to take a look at some things today better new for CES and power color because you guys have been asking about 290x custom cooler solutions and obviously everybody is responding to at the same time as there are now a ton of custom cooler options and that's what we have right here what I am holding in my hand is the power color 290x with the pcs+ cooling option on here this is available in a 290 and 290x and the specs on this for the 290x are 1,000 50 megahertz on the core clock for the 290x and 1040 megahert core clock on the 290 so as you know with the 290 and 290x the specs are very very similar I mean it's got 1,350 megahert yeah 1350 megahert memory speed on there at 5.4 gbps it's got 512 megabit memory bus width which is really unique obviously for this next generation AMD card but what really makes these coolers unique now is the fact that they're able to tame the heat that has just been generated in these cards now the cooling options that power colors come out with have generally been pretty cool now maybe air cooling isn't your thing maybe you're a water cooler like I am what I'm holding here is the power color LCS r9 290x i'm assuming LCS stands for liquid cooling system now power color has teamed up with EK to bring you a high quality water block right out of the box so you don't have to take off the water or the air cooler you not to worry about maybe warranty they've already done it for you now the speed on this is 1,000 60 megahertz core clock the same memory speed at 1350 and it is a 4 gigabyte model so it's only 10 megahertz faster than the 290x pcs+ version but you're going to have a lot more Headroom for overclocking on this absolutely one hundred percent silent operation of a graphics card and you're going to have just pretty much the ability to say that you have a badass card here with water cooling out of the box I mean a lot of companies have gone with some reference cooling for liquid coolers and they've teamed up with some companies but they just don't look good the power color pulled out all the stops and went with EK which we all know is a sexy water block and of course it has this really cool looking back play already on there so even though it's got some heft to it you're not going to be worrying about bending the card at all or or yanking it out of your motherboard because it's got the support right on there ok so we talked about the LCS 290x here from power color but just how does it perform well we've got an LCS system right here in this build here at the power color sweet but we're running battlefield 4 here on an affinity setup so for clarification we have one 290x LCS in here and going to come over here and show the the screens here now this is using I affinity and right now I have this set on high settings which I feel would be where you would want to set the system for a 3 monitor setup like this with one card and as you can see we're just under 50 frames per second over here so one card that's able to give you that kind of power and I'm assuming that it's not even overclocked beyond a factory now imagine if you were to put two of these in one system what would be capable of what you could do with that so if you're considering building an affinity setup or surround system or you just want to go for the ultimate gaming experience you definitely want to consider the power color LCS 290x it's gonna be available hopefully in the next hopefully this quarter but as you guys know when it comes to releases and things anything could change so as for release you guys are just going to have to keep checking with power color to see when that's available but if you you know you guys know battlefield is an extremely extremely strenuous game especially with the new frostbite engine so and clearly right here it has no issues whatsoever now I want to see how it was doing on ultra just for the heck of it and at 3 x 1080p monitors on ultra was still about 30 frames per second solid with no tearing and no stutters or anything so there you go guys this has been the power color LCS 290x here at CES 2014 make sure you're following on twitter so you don't miss any of our coverage and as always I will see you in my next video
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