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8 Pack looks at R290X

OcUK Staff
Joined
20 Feb 2012
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Ok guys lets see how R290X performs in many of our favourite benches here on the forums and on HWbot.

Sadly I had no Voltage control when benching these cards which I now have thanks to Hard mods by Shammy and software Via GPU tweak and the ASUS bios. I will be modding a card at weekend so I can give it an LN2 bench session.

All the stock benches where done on Z87 at 5ghz with 2600 C9 RAM. Overclocked where done on X79 4930K 4.75-4.9 2400 C9. All overclocked test where done with a 7-10% OC on the cards which is what can be gained stable with no voltage tweaks.

So here we go. 11 First.



R290X beating both a stock Titan and 780. Driver scaling is excellent upto three cards when the bench becomes very much CPU limited. LN2 on CPU would yield far higher scores. Disable Tessalation as you would when benching on HWbot the gap is massive.

I also ran 11 Xtreme preset as this more demanding on the GPU. This gave some interesting results.



In this Preset Titan at stock is beating the R290X with 780 lagging behind the pair. This surprised me abit as 11 is strong wth AMD. AMD have great scaling on this very demanding preset all the way upto four cards. This in many way proves AMD have got there drivers spot on where CPU bottleneck is not prevalent.

Firestrike next.



Here we see the 290X dominating at stock and scaling well. Upto 75% with four cards.

and Firestrike X



With this we see a similar pattern. Scaling even better with the addition of more cards. I feel this is again due to the CPU bottle neck not being the limiting factor of the scores obtained.

Heaven 3.0 next using the forum preset.



Here we see a similar story to 11. Scaling after three cards is very low. So CPU on LN2 we can see if that is the bottleneck or just the drivers not scaling. I will visit this at home in a future bench session.

Finally we have Valley



Titan is kicking butt here at stock with R290 pulling away under a low clock increase. The scaling on the driver side is very poor with this bench with 2 cards offering almost 95% scaling and then 3 or 4 getting worse. I am sure AMD will fix this with time.

My conclusions as far as this card and benching goes is it is a strong card and efficient. Given ASUS GPU tweak and there bios you have 1.41v to play with which will increase its overclocking potential vastly to what I had here. Also LN2 will remove what I perceive to be CPU related bottlenecks and prove if indeed AMD have got these drivers spot on or not. I suspect they have with the none CPU bottleneck testing showing to a great extent this.I will be further applying hard mods to give me even more volts this weekend and bench accordingly with updated scores on this thread.

The price point for all this graphical power is nothing short of a bargain and due to all these factors AMD are onto a real winner here.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2010
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14,591
Actually games are real world benchmarks that matter far more to the majority of people buying these cards.
As much as I agree on the context, I find it funny that when Nvidia is ahead in the sympathetic bench, people would happily use those results for showing how much "better" they are than AMD's offering; and when AMD does better, then it's "all about real-world benchmarks". Double-standard much?
 
Permabanned
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Funny enough when Nvidia is ahead in the sympathetic bench, people would happily use those results for showing how much "better" they are than AMD's offering; and when AMD does better, then it's "all about real-world benchmarks". Double-standard much?

Sympathetic benchmark, looooooooooooooool

Not double standards at all, I've always much preferred looking at game benchmarks on here than any synthetic benchmarks.
 
Caporegime
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24 Sep 2008
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Essex innit!
Games are not benchmarks!!! Many reviewers have done that man.

Agreed. Games are great for people to argue how it was played. Futuremark/Heaven/Valley offer a consistent bench that will always give the same scores within a couple of points.

When gauging how fast a card is, I like to see these bench results over a game bench.
 
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