Gadgetory

hey what's going on tech fans welcome back to tech of tomorrow I'm here with buddy the impatient and dog and today is launch day of the brand-new AMD r9 290x now the sample that we're getting is non-reference and we'll be here for about a week or so but we were lucky enough to hook up with our bro linus who's actually gonna bring the coverage for us so for all you folks out there after better once you guys hit that like button and show linus how much you appreciate him bringing that technology over here to tech go tomorrow so we could bring you stuff on launch day linus bro thank you very much man appreciate it very much and with that said let's bounce over to Canada and see what Linus has for us on the new r9 290x thank you for the invitation to do the guest review I appreciate it very much we were lucky enough to get one of AMD's Radeon r9 290x cards and I would be more than happy to tell you a little bit about it so number one is it uses the same GCN architecture as the last generation 7000 series but there have been some tweaks and improvements some new features and just generally some beefing up Ness of that last gen architecture to make it a truly next-gen performance card so for one thing that 1 gigahertz processor in there has over 6 billion transistors with 2,816 stream processors it now features a four gig memory frame buffer and a 512 bit bus this is important particularly in the future when we want to be playing games at greater than HD resolutions such as two and a half K or even 4k in fact the 290x really stretches its legs when you're gaming at 4k or an AMD Eyefinity technology which is surround 1080p monitors for the most part although you can do surround 4k and I did see that with two cards running at their conference and it was pretty freakin amazing now they've made changes other than that number one is it has DirectX 11 point 2 support but nobody is talking about that so let's just move right along number two is support for AMD's mantle API so this is a new way that game developers can probe on their game - instead of communicating with the card through an intermediary such as DirectX or OpenGL it can communicate directly to the card in a way that wasn't previously possible so when battlefield 4 comes out very shortly in its retailed form we're gonna be looking at probably AMD and NVIDIA neck-and-neck because they're gonna be under the same constraints and that is dealing with DirectX in December when battlefield 4 becomes the first game to officially support mantle we could be looking at a whole new world of performance not only for this card the 290x but also even for Amy's last generation 7000-series products because it is supported on any card running with a GCN architecture chip inside it but there's more guys the chips clocked it up to one gigahertz what exactly does that mean well their new power tune technology allows maximums to be set for pretty much anything and then handles the actual fluctuations on its own so you can set a maximum power consumption a maximum temperature a maximum clock speed and then voltage is actually going to be dynamically adjusted in order to keep all of those other things under control and optimize the card for as much performance as possible AMD's quoting changes in voltage as granular as once every 10 microseconds yes an extremely extremely small amount of time in order to leverage the available power that the card can consume now with that said yes the card does consume more power than GTX 780 and GTX Titan but it also performs extremely well it's also a little bit on the louder side but with the switch on the top you can decide whether you want the fan to run in quiet mode which maxes out at 40% fan speed or uber mode which maxes out at 55% fan speed more improvements guys easy Eyefinity now gone are the days of DisplayPort adapters in order to get Eyefinity running at all you can hook a monitor up to any of the four outputs out the back and you are ready to go you can also run up to 6 displays off of a single card using a DisplayPort hub and they no longer need to design an eyefinity 6 edition in order to enable that use case next up we've got true audio which right now okay there aren't a ton of games supporting yet but in the future could be a big deal it's a programmable DSP so that is a digital sound processor on the cart itself that will allow games to directly tap into resources that they never would have had before and they would have had to rely on the CPU because ever since Microsoft changed things around with Windows Vista and we weren't able to use hardware accelerated sound cards anymore we've been stuck pretty much in the dark ages as far as hardware accelerated audio goes so I really hope that this is something that takes off but right now it's only supported on the 290x the upcoming 290 and the two 60 X now with respect to overclocking and the way that power tune works we didn't get a very good overclocker I've had people commenting on on my reviews saying well Linus you've only got it clocked at this and other reviewers thought that you know what overclocking is a bit of a mixed bag I think we're not gonna get the true performance story of this card until you see non-reference designs with better power solutions and with better coolers on them that's when we will really see what radeon r9 290x is capable of so bear that in mind when you're looking at our overclock so we have a decent overclocking GTX 780 we overclocked all of the cards in our benchmarks our 290 X isn't a great overclocker but what we can say about it is that it is $100 less expensive than the card that you're about to see it real close to on all the following charts so without further ado let's rock out to benchmark music in the typical pack of tomorrow style someone's coming and I guess you guys are back anyway so that was a little awkward alright you guys looked at the numbers you saw them price the performance clear winner against the GTX 780 although we've yet to see what Nvidia is going to do with the 780 Ti next thing up is performance wise remember we overclock all the cards this one's a bit of a bunk overclocker and our 780 is an ok overclockers so if we factor in that other reviewers around the web we're getting upwards of 1 point 1 gigahertz on this card we can say with confidence that it should be performing particularly at higher resolutions and it does really stretch its leg as you amp up resolution it performs at least on power maybe better than the GTX 780 and that is without factoring in AMD mantel technology yet so in short it's up to you what you guys think but it looks to me like AMD has a winner on their hands if you're looking for a very high-end gaming solution with a great price to performance ratio thanks again for having me as a guest on tech of tomorrow I hope that I didn't bore you guys and without further ado back to Elric so wasn't that awesome news directly from Linus tech tips in Canada so right the bat once again a high salute to him the team over there make sure you guys sub to Linus tech tips for bringing this coverage over to us and probably the next time you see me lions together we're going to be giving away a giant amazing system so with that said I'm gonna go out and actually read some reviews and see what's all but this so I can actually form my own opinions in time for when I get my cards here at the house so that's it peace out thank you laughs we love you brother so much appreciation for that fans makes you do the right thing hit the like button here and go sub to Linus tech tips and if you love us hey you're not so hit that subscribe buttons you can see up side there behind out of here