Gadgetory

and we're speeding okay here we go James - sends 290x review I don't have a lot of slate so anyway what's up guys Jase $0.02 here and this is a long overdue video you guys have seen this being teased in other videos you guys have seen it on the test bench you guys have seen it on the shelf you guys have all been like when the hell are you gonna finally give us the Sapphire 290x try x8 gigabyte video I even talked about a PDX lamp back in February the new EVGA silent series power supplies offer excellent silence and efficiency through their new EVGA Eco mode technology and also features a seven-year warranty for worryfree gaming click the link in the description to learn more now we're going to spend a lot of time going over the specs of the card because the card is not new in fact the card is technically becoming aged as in videos released their newer generation cards this is still sitting on the Hawaii chipset or the Hawaii bass die and GPU which we have been waiting for the long-awaited 390x refresh so who knows when that's coming but with the launch of Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC and that kind of kind of be like the new benchmark that everyone's using I figured why don't we go ahead and take the sapphire 8 gigabyte the Tri X and we see how an aging card like this that's now available for about 300 bucks give or take depending on the time of the season and where you buy it and let's see how it performs on a brand new triple-a title like GTA 5 which has arguably one of the best-looking graphics of any PC game period now just a quick overview of the card it does have a 1050 megahertz GPU clock and a thirteen hundred and seventy-five megahertz Ram clock of course that is times four so you get effective whatever that number is times four I don't feel like doing math right now but what makes this card unique is the fact that this is the Tri x8 gigabyte this is an all custom PCB designed by sapphire it's got eight gigabytes of vram so that makes it ideal for high resolution gaming a little disclaimer here guys unfortunately we are not going to doing any 1440p or 4k gaming on this card today because we found out that this card does not play well with my Acer xB 280 HK I'll never remember that number I don't know why the xB 280 HK which is the one millisecond 4k panel from Acer and so unfortunately I don't know if it's a problem with the card or it's a problem with the monitor basically the monitor will just cycle display on and off where you get a black screen in an image a black screen and an image but windows actually perceives it as a disconnect because you even hear the disconnect sound so anyway we're not going to be doing anything like that now when it comes to power this thing does require 2 8 pin PCI Express power and it does have a recommended power requirement of I'm sorry look at the boxes I never remember this stuff but it does recommend a 750 watt power supply or higher I mean the 8 pins by themselves are 150 watts each and then you've got I believe a 75 watt that comes in through the PCI Express and not to mention this is a card that's kind of designed for overclocking so anyway as you guys can see on the back unfortunately I am going to being Sapphire slightly for the fact that it does not have a backplate but kudos to them for getting all eight gigabytes on the front side of the card there are no chips on the back now connectivity on the card is the same as any other 290x you get two DVI a DisplayPort 1.2 as well as your HDMI so it's got a massive cooler runs the entire length of the card the card has a lot of heft to it and of course you've got the three fans on this is not the vapor-x because they decided to go ahead and cut some cost off the card by getting rid of the vapor chamber and going with a straight-up heat pipe design in order to keep the cost down so much as possible on the card now they do say that the vapor X obviously performs better than this in terms of cooling but the cooling on this really isn't all that bad I'm not going to lie I played around the card already so it does a pretty fantastic job of cooling it does also have the Eber button and stuff up here on the top they've got a nice sapphire button that actually lights up when it's on other than that that's the only lights on the card there's no glowing logos there's no glowing fans or anything like that so it's a very low-key card in terms of glowing effects however the orange might not work for some people I mean if you've got a very specific aesthetic build it's very unlikely that orange just can it be that that that color scheme I mean fact Orange is quite niche more niche than the yellow that I'm doing so that may be one subjective dislike about this card is the fact that it does have orange all over it which is going to make it so that it could be a color clash which with many systems and many people who'd be using this card would likely be AMD fans who would like to do a red and black build and this card is just not going to fit in so I do feel they kind of missed an opportunity to make this card red and black which would have just been like quite essential AMD you know aesthetic so alright enough of that let's go ahead and turn around get into some GTA 5 and let's see how this card is performing remember this card is a lot cheaper than things like the 980 and especially the tight necks which are kind of like the new standards in terms of toppdogg high-end gaming so let's see if that holds true now because this is a fresh install here on the test bed I'm not gonna be able to pick up in the middle of the game so I am gonna have to play the initial like startup mission so yeah that's gonna it's gonna kind of stink a little bit since it's not like the full world so we'll just kind of do some excerpts of that and then we will go ahead and get into the lo Santos and we'll see how it does I tell you to say it's a Los Santos Los Santos just like here in Los Angeles they say Los Angeles Los Angeles means the Angels but sometimes or more like the Angels of Death hmm that's LA yeah so the game crashed and I do want to point this out and I wasn't sure if I wanted to point this out because it was happening a bit in the you know a little bit ago even at stock speeds but I've played about 15 hours on my a nvidia system not a single crash however on the AMD card I get crashes quite often so I'm not entirely too sure what that's about I'm running the latest drivers and yeah so if you guys are having an AMD card or if you guys are having crashes let me know what your graphics cards are down in the comments I'm curious if you guys are getting more crashes on AMD or Nvidia now Rockstar did use Nvidia cards to optimize this game in fact they use nine 80s so I'm not sure entirely on if this is some sort of a optimization of Nvidia cards over AMD we do know that that has taken place on AMD side as well so I'm curious as to what the general consensus consensus is down below so let me know if you're getting crashes tell me how often you crash and what card you're using please well this is crowdsourcing alright here we go and it crashed again see this is highly highly annoying third time's a charm right now even though I've already played this game quite a few times at eleven hundred and fifty megahertz not sure if it's the overclock I've backed down to 1,100 that's only a 50 megahertz overclock we know sorry sapphire but we know that two 90s and 290 exes are for overclocking the Hawaii GPU just does not have a lot of headroom so 50 megahertz could be enough to destabilize this card right now well let's go ahead and see how well this goes I'd like to play the game without the crashing of the games so far we're gonna call this a splash screen benchmark deep deep now if you guys don't know I've been live-streaming this game while only once so far but over on my twitch channel and I you guys keep telling me Trevor's the best Trevor's the best crazy son of a bitch well I finally unlocked Trevor and you guys are right Trevor is a crazy bastard Hey look at that we actually have a game playing amazing now for the resolution right now we are at 1080p 144 Hertz monitor though and all settings are 100% maxed out as far as they will go so I figured would do a 1080p test even though it's an 8 gigabyte card because a lot of games are calling for higher G RAM amounts now so even this game right now is sitting up near 4 gigabytes of needed be Ram at 1080p I think she just pooped her pants it's possible get in the closet come on come on get in there shoot your butt all right that'll do so yeah I will just show a minute or two of this and then we will we'll get into the main world I'll get through the the intro here without making this into an incredibly long video we'll get through the prologue and then we'll get into the real world with some Franklin some thug action and we'll see how that goes so you can see the FPS is doing pretty good here though I don't call 80s and 90s and hundreds even at 1080p slouch not at all now this guy here you have to ask himself did he wake up this morning and say I'm going to be a hero these guys have fully automatic weapons and I'm going to hold what appears to be some sort of a low caliber handgun or small caliber handgun to this guy's head I mean there you go problem solved how Michael says I don't have to do that I'm kind of curious as to what Michaels alternative was all right we'll get through all this we'll get maybe to the battle scene and we'll see how how things go oh we have a snitch on our hands oh dear I do not condone this behavior I'm just saying I feel incredibly dirty right now I would never do this in real life this is this is terrible behavior we're gonna go on a little nature walk I believe that guy in the back seats Trevor right but we just long hair and stuff let me try really crazy sombitch yeah well my share just got a little bigger coin they're shooting at us why that is so incredibly rude didn't see that coming yeah the grab the 1990 ex is like screaming over there this guy's gonna be a hero today huh where all these cops coming from I've never seen this many cops in a small town all right so now we're in Los Santos and you can see that our fps has taken a little bit of a hit oh yeah bye-bye cat that was a slowest cat ever and apparently Franklin has some anger issues I like this first mission here for Franklin where he's a repo man that was a nice Hollywood turn B so much of an FPS hit we took here in the city I saw a benchmark that shows that the 290x was getting 90 FPS in 1440p I'm really curious as to what those settings work as you can see in 1080p maxed out for getting 40s oh he did yeah so as you guys can see here the FPS is not great but I do have all the settings completely maxed out but I would think a card like a tooth the 290 X 8 gig would be able to handle GTA 5 at least 60 FPS while completely maxed there's blood all over the front of my car I love it wha don't jump alright so we just got away that's cool that's a big truck all right so let's see if we can get the settings to cooperate here so I mean everything's on very high right now so let's go to the normal alright so everything's on normal okay so restarted that mission all the way over again but now look at the FPS um 131 kill the cat because if I did the first time and you know it's funny about this is the game doesn't really look all that much different so you can see the FPS has jumped up quite a bit so unless you're running like an SLI setup or you know I don't know maybe I guess you would have to run an SLI set up for so unless you're running like an SLI setup or crossfire setup then you're going to definitely want to leave the settings at normal ground textures are a bit softer but as you can see the FPS is much more playable I mean that 40 FPS was pretty ugly but it doesn't really look all that different though to be honest and the FPS is now much much better so but we do get quite a bit of FPS fluctuation though all the way down to the 60s and all the way up to the hundreds that's kind of crazy so there you go guys I just wanted to kind of give you some performance numbers here for the 290x try x8 gigabyte from sapphire performs really really well at normal settings GTA 5 though is kind of like the new level and standard of high-end graphics processing for games so I think it did very very well especially at normal but the FPS at everything at very high even though it's an 8 gigabyte card it you can tell that the horsepower on the card is just starting to feel a little bit aged but nothing says putting another one of these cards in if you already own a 290x wouldn't absolutely just exponentially increase your gaming performance but to put things into perspective I run my three 980 s I don't have my Titans in my system yet I run my 3 980 s overclocked at 1440p resolution and I only get about 130 fps now I say of course only 130 but you would think with 3 980 s it would scale better but the SLI driver from video just launched well the day of the game launch obviously but all three cards are not being utilized properly both or two are being utilized to full potential and one is fluctuating between 50 and 100 constantly so maybe drivers for the game will improve the 290x performance over time clearly Nvidia got a head start on the driver optimization since Rockstar worked with this game in accordance or in an accompaniment in accordance or whatever the right word would be sorry guys words are hard whatever the right word would be for you know they worked with Nvidia to develop the game so of course in video would have a jump start on that I wish the card was red like I said I know I always am like red red red red sucks but it being like one of the best performing AMD cards on the market I think making it red would have made a statement and the orange is I think what feels to me like it could be a limiting factor on some of the sales but what do I know I mean sapphire hasn't told me how many of they've sold but they do perform extreme me well in temperature state in the 70s the entire time they get a little bit noisy but coil wine and stuff was completely non-existent it performed absolutely well so there you go guys JC scents taking a look at the Sapphire 290x and some gta5 I don't know what else to say well like I asked earlier if you guys are getting crashes let me know what card you're using down below I'm kind of interested to see since it's a brand new game some bugs are kind of expected but other than that fun game great card and as always guys thanks for watching