Gadgetory

now it should go without saying being a PC product reviewer means that I get to check out a lot of really cool and interesting things that I would have probably otherwise never gotten a chance to take a look at but unfortunately that can also be a downside where you take a look at so many things it takes a lot to get you excited anymore so envision tech asked me if I want to check out there are nine to ninety cryo Venom oh yeah what the heck go ahead and send it on over I wasn't expecting it to come in a damn wood great this is going to be good with the new Silencio performance optimized fans the cooler master Neptune 240 M delivers the perfect balance of noise and performance click the link in the description to find out more there's a lot of different r9 290 graphics cards on the market so you going to be asking yourself why the hell is this income in a wood crate what makes this so different from other graphics cards on the market well unlike the r9 290x matrix Platinum Edition which we took a look at it left a lot to be desired when it came to the coolie market now it's no lie that it's a very very hot graphics card I mean from the factory they were designed to run 95 degrees Celsius and that's enough to melt most gamers hearts if you will and their and their wallets and their egos because you're going to spend a lot of time trying to keep that sucker cool now unfortunately the cooler on that r9 290x matrix platinum doesn't even touch the memory chips and it doesn't even touch the VRMs erm has its own little dinky heatsink that doesn't even make contact with any of the heat pipes or any of that so unfortunately it's overclocking potential is extremely limited and that was my major gripe with that card now visiontek last year at CES announced that they were partnering up with ek where ek was going to be their block supplier and they were going to be offering a consumer water-cooled version of the r9 290 and 290x today we are going to take a look at the 290 now this comes in a crate because it has a hole water cooling loop in there but that's not where the enthusiasm stops you see I care about companies that care about the consumer experience not the bottom dollar basically they care about the bottom dollar their business or the business to make money but not just how much money they make but the overall consumer experience and when you spend the kind of money that comes with a custom water-cooled graphics card that has a complete loop with it available in either 240 or 360 millimetre radiator variants once again supplied by ek water blocks you get an extra level of support that even I wasn't expecting when I opened up this crate I've already looked inside of this because the excitement was just too damn much to control and I had to open it up and take a look inside it was just like a schoolgirl when it came I was like ripping the box open because I had never seen that graphics card box come while big enough to fit a small computer tower in but guys I got the 360 version here it's got a three sixty millimeter rad that's the cool stream PE I've already done review of this radiator independently on it actually earlier in the year when this radiator first launched but as I mentioned is available in the 240 and a 360 variant basically it's an entire custom loop that normally you'd have to buy a GPU water block for it comes with the GPU block pre-installed and the entire loop to go with it all you've got to do is buy a CPU block whatever block you want in fact they do also sell water blocks on their website makes perfect sense throw it in your loop and you've got a complete water-cooled loop including the graphics card with very very little fuss now when you take the top off the box there is quite a few things inside now it's a pine box in fact when when my wife saw this she walked by the room she did a double-take Kim right back in the room notice there was a wood crate on my box and she said my desk and she says can I have the box yeah it's pretty frickin awesome now right here on the side it says vision tech liquid-cooled series cryo Venom squeaky chair it doesn't actually say squeaky chair that's just my chair so cryo venom injected specimen handle with care if container is breached contact your local PC gaming Authority by that they mean Jays two cents that would be mean come on to YouTube check out my channel it'll tell you what's going on it says contents have been shown to cause lower temperatures increased GPU performance and further gaming addiction I mean this already tells you right here they're having some fun with this product and I love that now right on the top we've got some of our flex tube right here a basic stuff but here's the part that I found extremely interesting when it comes to this it says classified information enclosed and this got me thinking what is this we'll get back to this in a minute you've got an awful lot of bubble wrap protecting your GPU a lot of it in fact we'll get back to that we have got a bay reservoir this is a single five and a quarter bay reservoir with a built-in laying DD seat pump so it's a pump res combo that goes into single slot five and a quarter drive if you've got enough room for a CD drive you've got enough room for the pump and the reservoir and it's already preset up for you it's black it's quiet it's adjustable and you know it's got the same kind of quality that comes along with Ek as you come to inspect in fact it even has a little like beaker that you can use to fill it it's so freakin adorable I'd love everything about this kit so far in this a little package here we've got more stuff that goes along with the custom loop as you would come to expect you have got some LED lights here if you want to make the reservoir light up a jumper to start your power supply to be bleed your system you've got some echo echo echo lint Evo blood-red concentrate you mix that with distilled water and then of course you have got all of your fittings now these are 3/8 inch inner diameter number I don't recall exactly what the outer diameter is but I'm going to probably be sitting here popping this for the next two hours you've got some of the knowing normal jumpers that would come with your graphics cards for four pin to eight pin and 6 pin whatever I really hope you don't need these if you need these get a new power supply to yourself a favor and then you have of course got the three ek 222 1600 rpm fans same fans at come in the complete kit I should do the review on a couple months ago so yeah definitely need the fans and then there's nothing else in the box it's just a wood crate no but like I said the wife is already after this help me guys she wants to steal my crate but this this right here I have not seen any other graphics card companies include this even review models now usually review models they'll kind of do some of the overclocking work for you and tell you kind of what to expect as a reviewer so you know what you're getting yourself into before you even load up the card it kind of takes out some of the fun of it but it really doesn't happen too often every now and then I get one of those but what you find inside here is the normal paperwork that would come with your graphics card like the vision tech installation guide drivers you know all that sort of stuff warranty information we'll just throw that wherever visiontek paperwork some of the extended fittings and oring 's and stuff if you need to use a fitting extender so if you have a long fitting so the threads don't go too far in there chances are you won't need that but if you do instructions are right there this right here visiontek radeon r9 liquid-cooled series checklist and registration this is a handwritten card with the graphics card serial number the waterblock serial number the sticker for it complete stability test that's already been performed tells you how far this thing is going to overclock what percentage they even pressure test and vacuum test the block to make sure is not going to be any leaks in it stamp of approval and even the name of the builder justin hey bro thanks for checking out my card so I now know Justin W over a vision Tech is the guy who said this car is ready to rock there's no questions if you ever ever probably call them up you say this serial number hey Justin's the guy that said it was good to go and if you've got any problems the warranty information is all right here including the warranty card you fill it out and there you go vision Tech is not responsible for any further gaming addiction caused by the addiction of cryo venom to your machine now that leads us to the card if you guys haven't noticed this is going to be a little bit longer review than I normally spend on graphics cards because let's face it fish and Tech has spent more more time on this card for you the consumer than any other company as far as I'm concerned so I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this review because I have not been this excited about a product in a long long time now you guys know I'm an avid water cooler so a water-cooled graphics card from the factory from a company I like like ek UK is cooling my system back there you guys can imagine my excitement of taking a look at this card now I have not actually opened it as you guys can see the seal is intact I wanted to save opening this up for the camera go ahead and tear that go ahead and get inside does come in an electrostatic anti-static bag and there she is now like I mentioned earlier overclocks are affected by stability with vrm temperatures as well as memory temperatures and guess what this thing is cooling the vrm back here the chips the memory chips which are surrounding the GPU and of course the GPU it's got a sexy-ass back plate that goes with it I personally think it's very very sexy because it's the same exact model of back plate that is on my my skunk works rig over there with 3 9 80s but what's interesting is it's custom made back plate for vision Texas has vision Tech itched right into it and it says radeon r9 liquid-cooled series yes this thing is freaking amazing even has the fingerprints on the back so I know somebody has personally handled this graphics card thereby making their registration card and overclocking claims a little more valid of course we're not going to just take the cards word for it the overclocking cheat card there of course we're going to go ahead and do our own benchmarks on this so at this point I'm going to stop the video I'm going to take some time probably a few days to play around with this and see what numbers I can get out of it then we'll come back circle back and see exactly how well this thing performed so for me it's going to probably be a few days for you guys it's going to be just like well I got to say that I'm not really all that surprised when it comes to the performance of the r9 290 I mean really it's not a custom PCB or anything in fact it's really just a reference card that they have in-house Bend into their top tier cryo Venom line before putting the water blocks on and then they do all the custom work for you determining what a safe overclock range is now the cards been out for over a year the the r9 290 platform so it's really not all that surprising when it comes to performance I've got to say that but what I think is really awesome is that they do the guests they take the guesswork out of it now they had put on this card here that it was good for 1150 I got 1150 in fact I was able to get all the way up to eleven seventy-five on the megahertz now what they did tell me is that they tend to pull it back about five percent from what they find to be stable that way the customer can get a very good overclocking experience without getting any artifacting and whatnot so they do take a little bit of headroom into consideration but what really makes this card stand out which we've already taken a look at is the fact that it's got the EK water block and backplate pre-installed so you guys have to worry about voiding any warranties by doing that they've gone ahead and installed it for you and it comes with all the tubing and all of the pump and the integrated pump combo and the fittings and the radiator and it's actually a very good performer in fact this card with my 5820k overclocked in the loop never went harder than 52 degrees Celsius that's about 40 degrees lower than the factory settings when it comes to the r9 290 that's amazing now we already took a look at the benchmarks which shows that it's pretty much in line with other overclocked r9 290 s but really the benefit here is the temperatures I mean the temperatures of these cards are just damn hot when it comes to the hawaii-based GPUs I mean they are massively hot but not in this system in fact the cooling loop kept it well well under that 95 degree threshold which AMD says is safe now one of the downsides of going to a water-cooled card like this though that I have to say there's definitely cons involved with this is the coil whine there actually was a decent amount of coil whine on this card but coil whine is a lot like the silicon lottery are some cards or noisy SIM cards aren't it really is luck of the draw in fact sometimes it was noticeable sometimes it wasn't and the farther you overclock the core the card the louder the coil wine gets so you can find some easy medium there where you're okay with noise to performance ratio now this card happened to be a little bit noisier than I think would be normal but at the same time it's an open test bench most of the time my cards are in the close to a closed case we're not going to notice it nearly as much it's sitting on an open test bench it was very noticeable so it really isn't something that I think you're going to notice nearly as much especially if you're going with something like an R an R 5 or something to define R 5 or define R 4 or something that's really well sealed up when it comes to the acoustics so guys this has been my two cents about the r9 290 cryo venom from visiontek fantastic card it's definitely worth considering if you're looking at building a nice gaming rig especially at AMD based gaming rig it's a very very worthy card of a gaming platform I mean everything about this card is pretty fantastic that's why it's been such a great performing card in both sales and performance for the last year that the r9 290 has been around because it's just an amazing bargain for what you get for the money especially with the price drops recently so if you're building a gaming PC you highly want to consider this card and if you guys are looking at doing water cooling really this card just takes all the guesswork out of it does everything for you so I highly recommend taking a look at this over at the vision tech website I don't know if it's available anywhere else I know visiontext sells it obviously so there you go guys let me know what you guys want me to do on this channel give me some content ideas I'd love to do some crowdsourcing when it comes to topic ideas as always guys follow on Twitter or Facebook write Facebook is that what it's called yeah I was never into the whole Facebook thing a whole lot but I do like to go up there and see what you guys are recommending that I do on this channel as always guys I'll see you in the next