Gadgetory

welcome to tech es city this is brain coming back to you guys today with a review of the gigabyte r9 290 now this is an AMD graphics card and as you can see here it is one big graphics card now you guys are probably wondering you haven't tried an AMD graphics card in a while and yes I haven't however when I saw this thing pop up on Amazon for two hundred and fifty five USD with free shipping I was just my jaw dropped I mean you're getting a flagship card for $250 that's really good value for money however I did have to pay a little bit more in shipping and import duties since I do live in Japan however it still worked out a lot cheaper than I otherwise could have got this thing domestically for anyway well today we'll be having a look at the graphics card I'll be benchmarking it talking about how I think it compares to the GTX 970 I'll also be making a separate video comparing this graphics card directly to the GTX 970 as I do believe they're two of the best graphics cards out there at the moment and also be telling you guys some extra Augmented things with the AMD graphics cards there's still a few little things that I nitpick however they're not such a huge issue but anyway let's get on with the review so if you've followed me for a while you'll know that my history with AMD ATI graphics cards is complex to say the least I've either had problems with drivers cards overheating or cards just simply not overclocking at all however I'm pleased to say that this is a different experience and it has in ways renewed my faith with the AMD ATI graphics section of their company however let's look at this card directly at the moment so this is the one kilogram beast now this card is actually pretty heavy it's a lot heavier than my GTX 970 that I have around here this thing weighs in just over one kilogram so that at that weight it is pretty heavy it's actually a really solid build card but looking at the front of the car we can see here we've got three eighty millimeter fans they're also they do a fantastic job of cooling by the way they also don't get too noisy though past about 50% they do start to make a little bit of noise so be careful therefore you hate noise they've got the here the steel shroud here this is actually made of steel so it's not plastic I like what gigabyte have been doing with this lately as the GTX 670 I had years ago that actually had a plastic shroud on it this feels a lot better gives the card a more solid feel makes it look better you've also got this wind force logo sticking out here which I personally don't really like a lot I think the GTX 970 implemented the wind force logo a lot better than this did however looking at the slide here we can see that the shroud over extends the side here and actually looks cool we've got an 8 pin and 6 pin connector at the side here that'll give this card ample power for overclocking if you need to add the back we've got the shroud slightly coming over and this isn't much of a problem I mean it is a bit shorter than my GTX 970 this measures in around about 280 millimeters let's look at the rear of the card we've featured here no backplate personally I do like the back plates that gigabyte have been adding to their cards lately I would like to see a back plate on this card as well the back plate or no back plate it doesn't really bother me too much as I buy a graphics card for its performance not it's looks anyway looking at the back it does look pretty cool here you've just got a mountain of resistors on the back here it's got a black PCB as well which actually looks pretty cool looking at the rear of the card we have here two DVI connections here they're both two DVI dual port connections as well no DVI a which is interesting so something to be mindful of there you've also got a DisplayPort here and you've also got a HDMI port here so connections is pretty good I personally like to see a DVI a as I meana some people might want to overclock this thing and use an analog input also some quick features before we move on to the benchmarks this card itself it also has the ability to use our AMD's mantle and it also has the ability to use AMD's HDL trueaudio so where process is the audio off the graphs card itself so anyway without further ado let's move on now to the benchmarks okay so let's move on now to the benchmarks and I'll put my description for my rig in the description below for you guys it's a 5820k clocked at 4.2 gigs I'm also running 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory clocked at 2.4 gigs and the rest of it's in the description below if you want to check it out also another thing that's very well can actually concerns me about the r9 290 is before I reviewed this card I actually spent a long time gaming on it because I wanted to do this review for you guys as best as I could people were telling me for a long time try out the r9 290 from a good vendor and I consider gigabyte one of the best vendors out there and something I noticed about the UH 1990 was when I initially benched it - when I benched it two weeks after using it it was using I mean the benchmark scores were lower and I couldn't I just can't get my head around this anyway I'll talk about it a bit more but let's get on now to the benchmarks that I did before I took it out of my computer and this was done on a fresh install of Windows as well so anyway let's move on now to Battlefield 4 1440p ultra on the test range here the GTX 970 scored 110 point 8 frames per second and then the r9 290 out of the box scored all the factory settings scored 78 point five six so it actually got quite a beating in battlefield 4 moving on now to Crysis 3 1440p ultra now this time I decided to max out everything people like look man your Crysis 3 results before vary a little bit high so I decided to max out everything and man does this put a lot of stress on the GPU the GTX 970 out of the box called 35.9 to average FPS and the r9 290 scored twenty nine point nine six so both of these graphics cards were getting a hammering in Crysis 3 I'm a three this is mainly a CPU bound game for what it's worth as if you guys saw my comparison between the 5820k and for 670 K the 46 70 K was beating this because it was clocked 400 megahertz higher so for what it's worth it's still very CPU bound even at 1440p on ultra but it managed to score 70 3.8 frames per second versus 69 point 3 6 and while I'm pointing it out with the CPU bound thing I'll show you later when I do to show you the initial benchmark scores it doesn't make sense but anyway UniGene valley extreme HD preset the 1080p schools I've thrown the uh nine to seventy out of the box in there for reference but you can see here both these cards are in a different caliber to the online 270 with the r9 290 scoring two thousand five hundred sixty five when it was overclocked to 1089 megahertz and the RAM I also managed to get over a gig out of the RAM so the overclock on this thing I'll talk about a little bit later too but it was pretty impressive yeah GTX 970 overclocked as well that's called 2638 the uh nine to ninety out of the box scored two thousand three hundred fourteen verses the GTX 970 out of the box which scored two thousand four hundred and thirty six so let's move on now to the fire strike scores everyone loves to do a fire strike benchmarking it's a good reason it's a really GPU intensive benchmark so here we have the GTX 970 out of the box scoring twelve thousand two hundred right on the flat line there and the r9 290 out of the box scoring ten thousand four hundred ninety eight so both these cards did really well in fire strike also the r9 290 when I overclocked it it's scored eleven thousand six hundred again was weird it was right flat on eleven thousand six hundred with the GTX 970 overclocked scoring thirteen thousand two hundred and eighty nine so both these cards did really well in fire strike let's move on now to overclocking with Crysis 3 so this is a bit of an anomaly I mean this is pretty funny but again this was just such an intensive game on the GPUs the GTX 970 overclocked managed to score forty point three six as opposed the uh ninety to ninety which scored thirty two point zero four moving on now to the GTX 970 out of the boxes scored thirty five point nine to first at twenty one twenty nine point nine six was I showed you guys before so overclocking battlefield 4 here is another game which is pretty GPU intensive for what it's worth the GTX 970 overclocked scored 120 point zero eight versus the UH nine to ninety overclock which scored eighty six point seven four average frames per second so in battlefield 4 is a clear victory for the GTX 970 let's move on now to power noise and temps so this is power consumption this was measured from the wall on a 650 watt bronze earth watts power supply and we can see here that the r9 290 out of the box this is with the 5820k which is quite a power consumption beast in terms of CPUs so it's good 570 watts from the wall this was in unity and I did these scores in UniGene and the 970 out of the box called 480 both these cards on idle were actually really good they showed really good power consumption on idle mainly 30 watts over the 467 TK that would be mainly for the due to the 5820k but for what it's worth it used up about an extra 90 watts on load then the GTX 970 did I went to overclock these the GTX 970 actually scaled better than the r9 290 with the r9 290 scoring 615 watts from the wall as opposed to the GTX 970 which I need not to 505 watts let's move on now to temps and honestly with temps this was done at ambient degrees of around about 15 degrees Celsius or was pretty cold in here but the GTX 970 did I mean this was overclocked I decided to show you guys the overclocked results 60 degrees overclocked I mean the cooler didn't even get hot this is after gaming sessions as well the I mean the GTX 970 they all run pretty damn cool and they're not card they're not hard to keep under control the r9 290 was kind of an interesting thing because when I tested this card in the benchmarks I mean it didn't even cap 74 degrees on the on the ten rings in MSI Afterburner but one thing I did notice after using this card in heavy gaming sessions after a long time was that the cooler got really hot to touch and this was something that I wanted to point out because I don't know ms I mean sorry AMD where are they putting their temp sensors because I mean it was getting like sizzling hot to touch with my finger but the temps were still reading like around 70 degrees so I'm kind of scratching my head about the temps there because my GTX 970 if I touch it anytime like in this about 15 degrees ambient temps it's just really cool I could leave my finger on there all day every day and not after it's just literally really cool to touch so the uh nine to ninety after a heavy gaming session especially in advanced warfare that I was testing that out recently it just got really hot to touch and so it makes me wonder if AMD are putting their senses right on the core of their graphics card so that's something I'll point out because if we look at here the initial benchmarks this is before I got the graphics card before I used it for a long or for a while this is when I first installed it I ran some benchmarks and as we can see here this is the UH ninety to ninety when I initially got it it's got ninety point four eight and now before I did the benchmarks after two weeks I tried everything reinstalling the drivers everything like that to no avail my installed beta drivers as well I was getting the same scores of getting lower scores than when I initially got it so I'm kind of wondering what's going on here why is it scoring ninety point four eight out of the box it's beating its own overclocked settings so it's something that I'm scratching my head about look at Crysis 3 this is when I initially got it thirty point thirty four point one thirty three it's beating the overclocked scores why is that same with ARMA 3 and then now ARMA 3 is the most interesting thing because it's called seventy eight point seven two and my four point two gigs 5820k and I know this is a CPU bound game so I'm kind of wondering what's going on here with the AMD r9 290 there's it's it's weird like it shouldn't be the graphics card because I know this game I overclocked my GTX 970 and I was getting the same results with ARMA 3 I wasn't getting any higher scores so it makes me scratch my head what's going on with ARMA 3 yes so anyway that's something I'd like to point out another thing that I'll point out before I get to the conclusion is the stuttering the AMD my crostata it's something that it's a it's the reason why I left AMD graphics cards and I went to Nvidia graphics cards years ago I'll show you I'll pull up a simple video here this is me opening a video on Windows and on the armed it on the AMD and this is it's 60 frames per second from my camera 720p and then I'll run the same video playback on my GTX 970 and you guys can see if he self this is just a simple video because I noticed in some games there was some micro stuttering mainly mean here is a new earth had it the triple-a titles didn't suffer from this my crostata but something that concerns me it's still there to some degree I mean AMD have gotten a lot better with their drivers but it's still there something that does bother me but anyway with that being said there's the two video files I'll move on now to the conclusion where I'll talk about a lot about this graphics card in death so in conclusion what do I say for 250 USD if you can pick an online 290 up for that price then it does get recommended it's a good card it's just not a great card so if you guys have skipped at the conclusion then i really suggest that you do watch the benchmarks section because that's where i've explained all the anomalies of this card but I'll give you guys a quick recap if you didn't basically this card it ran better for the initial like when I initially got at the benchmarks ran better than when I tested it two weeks after using it in heavy gaming sessions so that was something that really made me scratch my head especially the ARMA 3 benchmark which I know is a CPU bound game for what it's worth so something was really was weird that was going on there I don't know what it was but coupled with the fact that there's still that micro stuttering it still exists especially in here as a new earth which is a game I play regularly it was still there I mean I showed you this the video where it's just a simple video of me watching a video my intro the one that you no longer you can no longer see but is the initial intro where it sucks in you can see that it's got a little bit of stutter on the AMD and on the Nvidia absolutely no stutter at all that's just a simple example in some games it has this micro stuttering it still exists it's basically a driver problem because in triple-a titles warlords of draenor and advanced warfare this card ran is smooth as butter on 1440p it was a really good experience and so Andy have come a long way since when I used to use them back in 2010 but it's reasons like the micro stuttering it's reasons like the two weeks lower benchmark scores is the reason why I switched to nvidia and i've never had a problem not one problem with any nvidia graphics card i've used over the past few years the game you know the overclock well they've run cool and quiet and then there's another thing about this card and that's even without the overclock settings applied the card was in advanced warfare was getting sizzling hot to touch like really damn hot i'll surprises like what's going on here this is it like 15 to 18 degrees ambient temps in this room so this card gots sizzling hot you know like and then the tempura dings will like on 60 I think they'll just just a little bit over 60 degrees like 64 degrees so it makes me wonder where AMD are putting the temp sensors on their grabbers cards are they actually putting them inside the cause or are they putting them after the cause sort of right near the cooler I don't know I'm not too sure but it does raise some concerns honestly should you overclock this graphics card I'd save a 24/7 gaming no I'd say it where it's at out of the box is probably around the sweet spot even in the summer get probably a bit hotter so I'd be concerned but honestly look let's look at it this way for $250 USD it gives really good scores so this is a 1440p card it'll play games exceptionally well at 1440p and then yeah I mean and then the stuttering I mean if you're playing triple-a titles you'll have a great time on this graphics card so for me honestly though if you guys are asking me for a personal recommendation I mean having experienced what I've experienced with AMD ATI graphics cards verses and video graphics cards I recommend paying the premium for the Nvidia graphics card as I always do now I don't even bother with AMD graphics cards but you know and I want to bother I know if you guys have watched me for a while I want to give AMD a chance all the time you know I love the fact that there's competition out there and these guys are trying to give you guys good value for money it's just like there's just these issues that seem to never go away with an AMD graphics card and it's kind of it just makes me wonder like AMD just come clean don't try any trickery or anything like that and try and work on your drivers a bit more because yeah I don't know anyway so on all you guys can take it as you will out of this review I mean look I'm gonna make a separate video comparing this to the GTX 970 and at the end of this video I'm going to also run a heap of new games as well so I'm gonna be running warlords of draenor and you will a Warcraft game I'm gonna be running watchdogs I'm gonna be running shadows immortal and advanced warfare so there's some new titles in there that will get stressed I'm dropping Skyrim and I dropped it in this video as it's pretty much just a CPU bound game even at 1440p and also I am dropping ARMA 3 as well but cuz that's pretty much cpu-bound because i want to be testing 1440p i also still be doing 1080p for when we gets through those real low low to mid-range budget cards of what it's worth this is a 1440p card it does get a recommendation at around 250 USD if you can pick it up for that but you know is it is it the GTX 970 killer I don't think so because some issues that I pointed out in this video but anyway guys if you enjoyed this review if you have any questions which I'm probably sure you will then please drop a comment in the comment section below and we can discuss things as always I love discussing this with you guys and if you haven't ready subscribe to take your city where you guys get the truth and you always will get the truth anyway I hope you enjoyed this review and peace out for now bye