Gadgetory

this card features a Hawaii XT core with 2,816 stream processor clocked at one point oh eight gigahertz boost clock four gigs of DDR five memory on a 512 bit bus and all that's clocked at five gigahertz as well but spoiler alert that's not actually the interesting thing about this product the r9 290x lightning from MSI is the fastest hands-down r9 290x card we have ever tested and really it make it feels like unlocks the potential of AMD's latest and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen yet with its factory tuning and data center DNA and Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts now it's not as simple as I mean I know that sounds great but it's not as simple as just okay well everyone should just get our 9 290x Lightning cards because it's a hundred and fifty bucks more than a bass r9 290x and even $100 more than MSI's pretty strong gaming card that has you know a dual fan cooler and some of that aftermarket stuff that we like to see so like what do you actually get for your extra hundred dollars well for one thing MSI has moved beyond the dual fan Twin Frozr cooler design to what they're calling the Tri frozer and while I'm not necessarily convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is PWM and can be individually controlled in software so you could actually run how whichever ones you want however fast you want so you could be like okay well I want the 86 millimeter ones on the outside to run faster in the 70 millimeter what I'm going to ramp that one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up they can tend to get a little bit whiny and loud so you can actually control that however you want to now okay so before we get into some of the other special stuff it does support the usual AMD technology so crossfire up to 4-way although you'll need to water cool it if you want to do that ek does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a triple slot design out-of-the-box you've got support for AMD mantle trueaudio a power tune which is their dynamic clock speed ramping up and ramping down to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power you've got easy eyefinity with no display port monitor required so you could run three monitors off of two DVI ports and an HDMI port which is really cool or even up to six displays if you use a DisplayPort hub and then of course it's got a four gig frame buffer like all r9 290 X's for a better 4k gaming experience it also has some unusual stuff so in the extremely sexy folding box that actually has like a drawer at the bottom for the accessories along with the usual like you know stickers and driver disk and manual and all that stuff is a certificate of stability adapters for using a multimeter to check voltages and a replacement VRM heatsink for subzero cooling now the card itself is designed with Sub Zero and nine it uses a completely non reference PCB with a 12 plus three-phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three PCIe connectors to eight pins and one six pin something that that power-hungry GPU pour in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed it's got an Ellen 2 BIOS switch which is something that manufacturers tell us isn't necessary if you're not going sub-zero but this is two cards in a row now that we've run into weird throttling issues on the first one was the kingpin classified 780ti from EVGA that was immediately fixed by enabling Ellen to mode and then once Ellen to mode was on remember you turn it off flip the switch because you're loading a new BIOS and then reboot it the card was a dream to overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all so also on the top of the card we have an LED indicator to show the cards load so in theory the Lightning logo is green for no load blue for medium and red for a heavy load but in practice once we overclocked it it just kind of red because we were pushing it pretty pretty hard and then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time I did mention that that cooler takes up three slots but I can see why they did it unlike some three slot coolers I've seen before almost the entire top of the card is basically a solid like grid of aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that so in terms of the sheer mass the card is extremely heavy so it's not like they just made it thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it it's three slot because it actually does perform that well and I would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers off and put water blocks on them with four of them running especially because you don't need the interconnects anymore so it would look extremely clean no crossfire bridges it's all done over the PCI Express bus and would perform incredibly well now before I hand off to Luke for benchmarking and telling you guys you know what I've been teasing just exactly how fast this card is I'd like to give MSI some props here even though they are asking for a significant premium for the privilege they're giving their customers the option to push the card as hard as they want with that ln2 bios even at the risk of bricking it and while officially they could reject your warranty for stuff that you do to it in my experience as long as there's nothing physically altered on the card when they receive it back they're not going to do that so if you grab a 290x lightning you can pretty much go to town on it because this is a very nicely Bend GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually quite quiet under load cooler an awesome backplate it looks great and okay okay I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how ballin this card is all right guys we're going to start off with the bench we've a CPU which is a 39 60 X clocked at 4.0 gigahertz for our RAM we have our RAM running at 1866 megahertz and for the graphics card it varies so check out the overclocking dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards along with the graph that we will show in a moment it did well it did pretty much exactly how I expected and that's not too surprising it's a really well binge 290x I've been waiting to get a really well binge 290x so that could beat my 780 for a while now and this one did it handily it doesn't meet the 780ti which is again expected but it's still very nice if you're looking for overclocking tips if you get this card I would highly recommend switching into ln2 mode even if you're just air cooling this seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability to the Cardinal is able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched into that mode alright guys if you enjoyed this and want to see all the rest of our line is tech tips content be sure to subscribe to Linus tech tips here on YouTube and while you're here and while your cursor is below this video click and subscribe be sure to also click like share favorite all that kind of stuff and comment on whether or not this is a card you're interested in I know some of the American viewers might be a little bit shaky about getting it just to the cost-prohibitive mister is on buying a 290x in the States right now due to coin money and all that kind of stuff if you want to talk about that more maybe jump over the forum it's a little bit friendlier of a comment section and if you want to get rid of those ads on the forum you can always contribute any contribution level in the forum gets rid of all the ads so yeah thanks for watching I'll see you guys next time you