Gadgetory

the fractal design define our for case gets featured on the windchill bill blogs the week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it welcome to my unboxing and review of one of the most anticipated graphics card launches in recent memory this is the r9 290x from AMD it is their new ultimate performance flagship single GPU card it features the same GCN architecture as the last gen 7000 series as well as the Wii U and the ps4 and the Xbox one but with some performance enhancements as well as some feature tweaks so let's start with a quick rundown of the specs the GPU core inside here is clocked at 1 gigahertz which considering that it is a fixed billion transistor GPU core is nothing short of very very impressive it has 4 gigs of 512 bit gddr5 memory it's got 2,816 stream processors so yeah there's more performance and it's four gigs of gddr5 memory are running on a 512 bit bus meaning there is massive memory bandwidth and a ton of memory available to it and there's a very good reason for that it is optimized for greater than HD gaming compared to the last generation 7970 gigahertz Edition it has twice the pixel fillrate performance almost and nearly double the geometry performance so that basically means it's made to take what the last gen could do which is kind of two and a half K gaming amp it up a notch and deliver that kind of performance at 4k resolutions on the front of the card other than the upgraded industrial design there's not much to talk about other than this right here the fan has been significantly altered versus previous generation products so the fan profile the software that controls it is able to ramp up and ramp down the speeds much more slowly making it sound less aggressive to your ears this ties in very nicely with their new upgraded power tuning technology so think of it kind of like GPU boost 2.0 for AMD they're not really going to want me to say that but let's face it so it's taking four pillars so that is voltage clock speed power and temperature and then balancing the performance of the GPU against all of those things in order to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the graphics card now what AMD says is unique about their implementation is that the voltage control is incredibly granular and it can switch voltage steps and around ten microseconds meaning that it is always pushing to squeeze as much perf as possible out of the card now power tune comes dialed in at 95 degrees Celsius however you know some folks are not necessarily comfortable with their graphics card running at 95 degrees it'll run at that temperature all the time because of the way it's designed don't worry power tune is fully customizable so if you decide you have a different maximum fan speed you want or you have a different maximum temperature you want to see it'll adjust all the other parameters that is clock speed therefore performance in order to keep in line with your expectations now Nvidia ships their cards dialed in at 80 degrees by default but it should be noted that it was only a generation or two ago that in video was also saying it was fine for GPUs to run at 100 degrees slipping around to the top of the card we find where the plastic shroud is joined to the metal yoona sink that provides cooling for the RAM and vrm components we also find cross-market no no crossfire connectors AMD has tested the card in fact they left the contact points on the PCB so that they could actually get a wire one up to make sure that it doesn't make a difference and they tested it down to PCIe 8 X 2 cards running an 8 X Gen 2 and saw no performance difference between putting the connectors on and not putting the connectors on so the crossfire connector is gone on this card we also find the power connectors so there's an 8 pin PCIe and a 6 pin PCI II plug and finally is the bios which has made a return so by default it comes with uber and quiet fan profiles in two separate biases and you can flip between them as you want in by default the quiet mode is closer to the i/o panel so naturally we have gone and put again uber mode on the rear i/o we find ventilations so this is a blower design card so while some air is going to come out up here most of its going to come out the back of the card and be exhausted from your case as well as for all digital outputs all digital you might say Oh DVI to VGA no no adapter the analog signaling is not there MD has made some other tweet to this though as well so check this out two DVI ports one HDMI camera and Eyefinity off of those reports whoa hey now you can you can run three 1080p monitors off DVI DVI and HDMI you can still use DisplayPort 4i Finity but it's totally up to you matching DVI monitors no big deal in HDMI to DVI cable will take care of that with no conversion they've made some changes to the way that they allocate resources in order to make that possible which is very very cool DisplayPort you can also get some commercially available DisplayPort hubs now which will allow you to easily run 6 displays off of this card so there is no need for an affinity 6 Edition card anymore now speaking of the HDMI port on the back AMD was the first to implement sound over HDMI on their graphics cards a couple generations ago and they are throwing another first status with this card this is the second card on the market to implement AMD's true audio technology so that is a programmable DSP that is built right onto the card that is dedicated Hardware just to process audio that means lower CPU utilization better surround affects less pledgie approximations of environmental effects using reverb as well as generally more immersive sound it does rely on support from middleware developers as well as from game developers so given that there's only a couple cards in the market right now that support it maybe it's not going to be a huge thing yet but in the future thumbs up AMD for implementing that flipping over to the back of the card we've got the GPU itself so that's clocked at up to one gigahertz and then we've also got ya countin 16 memory chips so Andy has opted to mount all of the memory on the front of the card where it can be cooled by that Yunis ink and because of its 512 bit memory interface it actually needs 16 memory modules in order to function so there you go guys quite the engineering feat cramming all of that in there while we're back here I want to take a moment to talk about zero core technology so when your computer is idling and your screen turns off MD cards can actually almost completely turn off the graphics card so it uses almost no power we've already seen this before but just a reminder guys zero Core is a thing and it does help save power if you're not the kind of person who always puts their computer to sleep or turns it off when there using it next up we've got mantle which is a potential game changer it's going to be supported by this card and all GCN architecture cards it is a new API that allows more direct communication between the game engine itself and the hardware inside your graphics card rather than going through DirectX which is an intermediary layer that doesn't allow for the same kind of bare metal programming for an individual graphics card architecture it's not the same as a next-gen console even though they use a GCN architecture but AMD is hoping that because of the similar architectures some of the principles that developers are using to optimize on those consoles can be used through mantle to get better performance on AMD cards it will rely heavily on developer support so battlefield 4 is going to have mantle support coming in December and at their developer conference in November 2013 we are expecting to see announcements from a lot of other developers based on the rumors that I've heard chirping around now before we get into performance numbers I want to talk about overclocking we run all of our cards overclocked and overclocking is very different on 290x so instead of the traditional clock speed slider and fan speed slider now you set a maximum fan speed and you have a little heat map grid within AMD's overdrive utility that allows you to see how the settings you're applying and it's a percentage based overclock now not a plot speed based overclock affect both the clock speed as well as the temperature and the power targets and how all those things work together so you're going to want to spend a little bit of time learning about that before you go and try and overclock this card now for us we were running an uber mode we ran at 1080p and then we did a special head-to-head battle between r9 290x and GTX 780 at two and a half K however we don't have a 4k monitor at this time an AMD informs me that the 290x doesn't really stretch its legs and show its mettle until you hook it up to a 4k display without further adue off to use like there has been a ton of anticipation over these numbers so I'm just going to go right into it and something that a lot of people are going to notice right off the bat is that this card is not actually topping our charts to explain we have been running our graphics card tests for quite a while now with everything overclocked to the wall and this test is no different we're running everything overclocked as much as possible and we found the 290x actually comes out of the box quite aggressively clocked and there isn't a ton of headroom left now we were interested when it started not being at the top of our charts so I did a little bit of Investigation and when the 780 and 290x are both at stock the 290 X and the 780 often switched position the 290 X is actually usually on top but we on all of our tests overclocked so moving on another thing to note is that this card is about $550 and a 780 is about 650 dollars maybe give a few more depending on where you are now at about 20% cheaper in our 1080p benchmarks it's only 10% slower jumping to 2560 by 1440 P we noticed actually that the story got even sweeter at about only 5% loss in performance that makes that whole price performance thing even better we were seeing 10% on 1080p and now we're only seeing 5% that's great moving up to 4k it's supposed to be even better we unfortunately don't have those numbers as we don't have a screen that can support that though another thing to note is that with star citizen everything is kind of skewed that game is not released yet that game is not optimized yet and I can I think it's going to happen but mantle is not on it yet at all so those three things will actually change the game a ton we just wanted to include it because star citizen no actual real logical reason we just wanted to show how it's performing right now just in case you're one of those guys that's going to jump on the hanger module that's going to jump on dogfighting that's going to jump on everything in the future because you're big follower star Susan and we know there's a ton of you out there if you liked the video like the video if you just liked the video dislike the video and in the comments below what are you going for are you going for that sensible price per performance route are you going for the hardcore I want to be at the top of the charts with crazy amounts of overclocking all that kind of stuff angle what is your angle and oh as always be sure to subscribe to the latest tech tips you