Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and if you follow me on Twitter he know I've got my hands on something that's really elite and really hard to get no get your mind out of the gutter guys we're talking about the r9 290 OC gaming edition graphics card jeez what the heck kind of viewers do I have now if you've been following Hardware for any length of time you've known over the last couple of months that crypto mine cryptocurrency mining has really created a shortage of graphics cards when it comes to AMD I mean AMD's graphics cards particularly the r9 in the seventy eight hundred and seventy nine hundred series graphics cards have just shot through the roof in popularity because of how well they do at that cryptocurrency mining so that has made this card very difficult to get just to hold this card right now kind of feels like an honor now I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the specs because the r9 290 it's not an X it's a 290 which I kind of feel as a better bang for the buck honestly and I'll kind of get into that in the conclusions spec wise is pretty much identical to the reference model with the exception of a couple of things obviously we've got upgraded cooling on here quite a bit of upgraded cooling ii msi is implemented their military class component tree into the PCB with better ferret ferrets and chokes better capacitors just all-around beefier componentry and the weight of the card is certainly evidence of that they've also included on the back which I feel every graphics card should have simply because this is what you spend all your time looking at a aluminium backplate this beautiful brushed aluminum finish it's got the MSI name branded right on there and it looks amazing now when it comes to the cooler on this thing the the actual heatsink itself runs the entire length of the card as well as being taller than the height of the card which means if you're going to be putting this in a small form-factor case maybe might rip micro ATX or even a mini ITX you need to be mindful of the additional height AMD's mantle api did drop which means if your run program or a game that utilizes the mantle API you can get a boost in performance because of the reduced strain on your CPU which is really good for your graphics card it's a little less evident and higher-end cards like this a lot more evident in lower end cards like the 270 sitting behind me but otherwise it is going to be using DirectX 11 point 2 and you know the performance on this is amazing we'll get into that at the end of the video there are some physical things I want to talk about here on the card it does have a dual BIOS switch right here and there is one thing I need to point out when it comes to the physicality or the physical properties of this card that I kind of feel MSI overlooked and I want to make you aware of it if you take a look at the six pin and eight pin power connector the heatsink rises up basically over top of the clips where you detach those power plugs so unfortunately you can't get your finger down in there to release the power clips are the clips that hold the power plugs into their socket so I have to get a small flat-head screwdriver and kind of push up and pull out and they pop right out I just want to make you aware of that that I think that might have been a little bit of an oversight on MSI's part where you can't actually get your fingers in there to release the thing and then it's not even a matter of having fat fingers like I do I don't think anybody's fingers would fit in there but that's really the only thing I can point out in this card that is physically maybe a downside now just like all the other GCN architecture graphics card from AMD there is no crossfire bridge because it's all handled through the PCI Express now let's go ahead and talk about what it is I know you guys want to discuss temperatures we'll get to the performance in frames per second number soon let's talk temperatures because let's face it the 95 degree temperature threshold the AMD said was perfectly normal for the reference model is just way too damn high sorry AMD I know you know best but we hear the ones that the deal with the temperature and heat kills componentry 95 degrees temperature no bueno so the Twin Frozr cooler on here runs default at 18 percent at idle and it never got higher than 30 percent when it comes to the fan speed even at its hottest temperatures now without touching the overclock this thing runs at 1007 megahertz out of the box that's up from the 941 which is basically the standard boost clock on this thing when it comes to AMD's r9 290 so you are getting an overclock on this thing out of the box hence the OC on the box now the 1007 megahertz mark and the 5 gigahertz memory clock this thing was sitting right about 77 degrees Celsius in my open air test bench with the thirty-first 30% fan speed now I wanted to see exactly where we could push this thing so I overclocked this and spent a lot of time in fact I spent hours trying to find the stable overclock on this for mine which happens to be 1085 megahertz and about 5500 megahertz on the memory bumping up the core voltage a little bit as well as the power threshold and I also ramped up the fan speed to about 60% which is pretty much matching what the case fan profile was when it comes to audible audio so it wasn't really any louder than the case already was which kept it from being intrusive and I found that the temperatures ran right about 75 degrees Celsius while overclocked so depending on how noise sensitive you are you can lower the temperature of this by ramping the fan speed up higher onward to the things it is you want to know about and that is how are the temperatures and how are the frames per second just stop ladder data blabbing and tell us exactly how it performed well guys when it comes to battlefield 4 I was seeing an average of 93 frames per second temperatures never exceeded about about 79 to 80 degrees Celsius depending on ambient temperature with the stock fan profile of 18% ramping up to 30 if you're willing to push the fans a little bit faster to about 60% which I still found to be extremely quiet and nowhere near the audio range of what the reference blower style card is you can get those temperatures all the way down to about 75 degrees Celsius while pushing the overclocked even farther speaking of overclock I happen to get this card - about 1085 megahertz which is a bit lower than some of the people have gotten on their cards but man when it comes to the power this thing puts out 1085 is no slouch and at 1080p gaming it is just massive overkill and when it comes to frames-per-second there was certainly no surprise there it just shattered any game I threw at it and when it comes to the benchmarks at bench right where I thought it would and everything about this card was actually really pleasant to benchmark and mess around with in fact when it comes to being air-cooled it really performed a lot better than better than I thought it would considering how hot these cards are from the factory I mean MSI and all the other brands out there certainly have their work cut out for them keeping this card cool now with that said you're going to want to keep various things in mind depending on the size of your case smaller cases are obviously going to create a hotter ambient temperature for this which is going to create a situation where you're going to definitely have to keep the cooling and ventilation of your case in mind when it comes to this card now guys tell me what you think about this card it's certainly an interesting market at the time that this video was created considering that what cryptocurrency mining is currently doing to the price of these cards versus what their team green opponents are doing on the other side of the fence for the same price ratio and sometimes even cheaper so what do you guys think what would you pick the r9 290 or gtx 780 which is in many cases much cheaper than this card guys has been jays two cents make sure you leave a comment tell me what you guys think if you liked this video it helped you out in any way make sure you share it with somebody you feel would help follow me on Twitter for more teasers like this videos you guys knew was coming if you follow on Twitter and as always I will see you guys in my next video you