Gadgetory

by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more the AMD Radeon r9 290 when it launched to turn the graphics card market pretty much on its ear by delivering performance competitive with the then $700 plus GTX 780 at $400 there were some issues however power tune is AMD's technology that balances power consumption clock speed temperature and fan speed so while the card is advertised to run it up to 947 megahertz it and it's big brother the 290x often runs into thermal limits causing clock speeds and voltage to scale down so they don't actually run at the speeds on the box in games this throttling behavior could be blamed on a couple of things one of them is the high heat output of the Hawaii GPU with its massive 6 billion transistors the other is the lackluster reference cooler with its loud fan that forces end-users to choose between hairdryer lake noise or throttle performance now whatever you want to blame it on there were a few things that were very clear number one is that the r9 290 already performed very well against the GTX 780 which prompted Nvidia to drop prices only down to 500 mind you but it was a drop number two is that we won't have a clear idea of what the card is truly capable of until we get better coolers in the form of twin frozer or direct Cu to class coolers from guys like MSI and a soos even with custom air cooling though we'd have no way to know for sure whether any thermal throttling was occurring we've observed both good and bad things about Nvidia's GPU boost 2.0 which is similar to AMD's power tune a good thing about it is that unlike AMD they provide a base clock so you'll have a reference point for the minimum performance you'll be getting if you buy the card one bad thing we've noticed however is that while GPU boost 2.0 provides end-user customization and allows you to change your thermal limit manually for example from 80 degrees to 95 degrees it seems to be actually just doing whatever it wants in the background so yeah you can change it but it's just throttling anyway so we wanted to remove all possibility of thermal throttling and liquid cool the cards fortunately we contacted khulus who hooked us up not only with the water block that fits on either the r9 290 or the 290 X you can check the link in the video description for pricing and availability of the gear we used in this video but also a GTX 780 block a pump a reservoir and some awesome awesome quick disconnect fittings that let us do very fast graphics card swaps on our first ever liquid cooled test bench in fact guys I just disconnected a tube here that's completely full of water and we got no leakage whatsoever alright moving on to the test we used the Maximus 5 formula with a 3770k at 3.9 gigahertz eight gigs of ddr3 memory at 1600 megahertz and a PC power and cooling 1200 watt power supply as always our graphics cards were overclocked as high as they could go on both air and water and we used two separate liquid cooling loops for the CPU and for the graphics card so we could isolate the heat generated by the GPU so we could remove variables when evaluating them in terms of their thermal performance if you guys want to see the clock speeds we were running out on the graphics cards there will be a link to our chart in the video description below our results surprised us a lot we were like everyone on the entire internet expecting the r9 290 to overclock like a beast and destroy the 780 out of which we were expecting only a mild performance improvement now because we traditionally set our 780 295 degrees on the thermal limit for an apples-to-apples comparison against AMD cards and it only ever runs at 80 degrees we assumed that there was no additional Headroom to unlock with better cooling because we were never hitting our user-defined thermal limits but it turns out that for liquid cooling enthusiasts and videos monkey business with the user adjustable thermal limits turns into some pretty good performance gains for that card when it's running underwater as well so first up is thermal performance both cards ran between 35 to 45 degrees Celsius under load with the 780 being closer to 35 in the 290 being closer to 45 when it comes to gaming performance we only really tested a couple games because what we were looking for in this video was performance scaling from air to water so a huge library of games wasn't really necessary what we found is that the max overclocked performance of the GTX 780 improved by just under 10% and the max overclocked performance of the r9 290 improved by about 7% that means that basically when you're out there shopping and deciding between these two cards with the intention of going water you can basically look at any performance comparison chart and factor in another five to ten percent for each when you're doing your value analysis on the subject of value in performance this video is a great example of why I don't talk about pricing for products in my videos the r9 290 launched at $400 which would have made it a clear winner against the $500 GTX 780 in this particular showdown but it now costs $500 to making it exactly the same price but with higher power consumption and higher heat output so for the gamers out there the GTX 780 gets the nod from me at the moment but there are things other than games and AMD's cards are well known to perform incredibly well against their Nvidia counterparts in some compute applications one example of which being cryptocurrency mining and folks are buying up AMD graphics cards by the truckload for bitcoin and litecoin mining and that's been causing some serious changes to the retail pricing as I outlined before so ultimately it'll be up to you the viewer to look at the performance numbers then check out the values that we're showing you in terms of what you can expect when overclocking then check out the links to the cards in the video description to do the value calculation for yourself if you're curious guys you can see the overclocked values for our graphics cards in the Google Doc linked in the video description remember that overclocking is always a crapshoot and you may get a card that overclocks better than ours you may get one that overclocks worse than ours and there's no guarantee for any of that stuff so anyways guys I hope you enjoyed this video on the removal of thermal limits from the r9 290 and the GTX 780 let us know in the comments if the results surprised you or if they were what you expected like the video if you liked it dislike it if you just like to de nos always Bob's doing really good up till there as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips you