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| 5 Out of 10 |  |
by techPowerUp!NVIDIA's GTX 780, which has seen a price drop down to $500 last week suddenly looks really expensive, but it does run cooler and quieter; not sure if that's worth the extra $100.
by techPowerUp!It yields additional performance to beat the GTX 780 by increasing maximum fan speed from 40% to 47.
GPUBoss Review Our evaluation of the Radeon R9 290 among Desktop GPUs over $400
Gaming | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 21 more | |
Graphics | |
| | |
| T-Rex, Manhattan, Sky Diver Factor and Fire Strike Factor | |
Computing | |
| | |
| Face Detection, Ocean Surface Simulation and 3 more | |
Performance per Watt | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 31 more | |
Value | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 31 more | |
Noise and Power | |
| | |
| TDP, Idle Power Consumption, Load Power Consumption and 2 more | |
| 5 | Overall Score |
| | |
Benchmarks Real world tests of the Radeon R9 290
Bitcoin mining Data courtesy CompuBench
Face detection Data courtesy CompuBench
Ocean surface simulation Data courtesy CompuBench
T-Rex (GFXBench 3.0) Data courtesy CompuBench
Manhattan (GFXBench 3.0) Data courtesy CompuBench
Fire Strike Factor Data courtesy FutureMark
Sky Diver Factor Data courtesy FutureMark
Crysis 3
Reviews Word on the street for the Radeon R9 290
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|---|---|---|
What People Are Saying Give it to me straight
Performance
by techPowerUp!One cornerstone for this impressive performance is AMD's updated driver: it switches the upper fan speed limit from 40% to 47%, which yields higher performance because it allows the card to throttle later.
by techPowerUp!The driver does not affect the fan speed/performance ratio of any other AMD product.
by techPowerUp!I'm don't really know why AMD increased the fan speed limit at the last minute instead of looking into making the card quieter and doubt many people will care about a few percent in performance, or whether the card beats the GTX 780.
Applications
by techPowerUp!As soon as you play any games on the card, though, the experience becomes extremely noisy.
by techPowerUp!Averaged over all our games and resolutions, the card exactly matches the performance of the Radeon R9 290X in "Quiet" mode, and the difference is just - 6%, very little, compared to the R9 290X in "Uber" mode.
by techPowerUp!It is functionally very similar to the CHiL controllers we've seen on previous generation cards and provides software voltage control and extensive monitoring via I2C.
Price
by techPowerUp!Right now, the R9 290 has the best price/performance ratio in the segment, and just like with the R9 290X, its price helps me overlook its shortcomings in regards to power, heat, and noise.
by techPowerUp!Then you'll be sold after hearing the price.
by techPowerUp!At $399, the same price at which NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 770 and a whole $150 (27 percent) cheaper than the Radeon R9 290X launched last month, the Radeon R9 290 is another disruptive product from AMD designed to wreck the competition's lineup.
Memory
by techPowerUp!The TMU count is down from 176 to 160, and the GPU core clock speed is 948 MHz instead of 1000 MHz.
by techPowerUp!Overclocking of our card worked reasonably well and did yield positive performance improvements (remember, the R9 290X in quiet mode scaled negatively during OC), but a bug in the BIOS seems to hold back memory overclocking—the memory could clock much higher and did so on the R9 290X using the exact same PCB and components.
by techPowerUp!The cooler also cools memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.
Gaming
by techPowerUp!The card's noise will overpower any other component and possibly your game's audio; that is, unless you play with headphones or increase the volume.
Specifications Full list of technical specs
gpu
| GPU brand | AMD |
|---|---|
| GPU name | Hawaii |
| Market | Desktop |
| Clock speed | 947 MHz |
| Turbo clock speed | 947 MHz |
| Is dual GPU | No |
| Reference card | None |
raw performance
| Shading units | 2,560 |
|---|---|
| Texture mapping units | 160 |
| Render output processors | 64 |
| Compute units | 40 |
| Pixel rate | 60.6 GPixel/s |
| Texture rate | 152 GTexel/s |
| Floating-point performance | 4,800 GFLOPS |
memory
| Memory clock speed | 1,125 MHz |
|---|---|
| Effective memory clock speed | 5,000 MHz |
| Memory bus | 512 bit |
| Memory | 4,096 MB |
| Memory type | GDDR5 |
| Memory bandwidth | 320 GB/s |
noise and power
| TDP | 300W |
|---|---|
| Idle noise level | 39.5 dB |
| Load noise level | 57.2 dB |
| Idle power consumption | 87W |
| Load power consumption | 381W |
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Competitors
 | AMD Radeon R9 290X
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 780
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 960
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 770
|
 | Generic Radeon R9 280X
|
 | |
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
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Other Radeon R9 290s
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