Born_2_Kill_83 said:

Has any-one moved from a CF7970GHZ setup in here to a CF290X setup?

I'm wondering if its worth it at this point moving from my CF7970 @ 1150/1600 to CF X290, there doesn't appear to be a big enough leap in performance looking at the benchmarks with the 7990 involved, even this card is slightly slower than CF7970GHZ.

I think I may wait till they release upgraded coolers that enable to O/C the card more as it hardly seems fair atm. Unless....any-one can convince me otherwise?

Click to expand...

If you are watercooling it then there's no reason not to move over, but if you are stuck on air, I'd wait for the aftermarket coolers to come out personally.

well with Gibbos settings card does run fine. But its stuck at 1050mhz after doing Anything.

LtMatt said:

Looks like its going to take some time for people to figure out how to get the best from this, without throttling and what not. All this tweaking sounds right up my street.

Click to expand...

I can see you getting one to play about with Matt

Heisenberg said:

I can see you getting one to play about with Matt

Click to expand...

Stranger things have happened. I bet id make it purr.

Lord_ZED said:

well with Gibbos settings card does run fine. But its stuck at 1050mhz after doing Anything.

Click to expand...

If you leave it at idle long enough *eventually* it returns to 300mhz , however i have noticed that gpu-z sensor monitoring seems to cause the cards to not return to idle.

I have decided to return mine and await a better cooler. The card itself is fantastic but the cooler is awful. After half hour of BF3 the fan noise is horrendous and very intrusive. I could not use this in a system for someone and after hearing the noise they have gone for a 780.

Bit of a shame AMD cheeped out on the cooler. I will order again when there are better coolers available.

Mine arrived this morning.



Now I jsut have to bleed and remove my 6990 and possibly dead 6970 out of my system, then rebuild and leak test before installing the 290x Cant beat water cooling for performance and silence but its still a pin in the arse when upgrading.

I think when these come out with non reference coolers so they are cooler and quieter and have some overclocking headroom, i might be tempted.

At the moment the early bugs, heat and noise are not good.

darket said:

If you leave it at idle long enough *eventually* it returns to 300mhz , however i have noticed that gpu-z sensor monitoring seems to cause the cards to not return to idle.

Click to expand...

Yes there is a bug on gpu-z and amd drivers at the moment. If you run gpu-z it kicks the card into 3d mode and send usage up to 99%. Use afterburner for monitoring. I noticed this a while back.

This is what i mean , the card was at idle at 3000mhz , open gpu-z and start monitoring and the card will shoot to 100% usage and the temps will start to ramp up , its now at 78c , close gpu-z and the card will eventually return to idle

See my post above. Quit using gpu-z until a new version comes out.

As has been said, people need to remember if you buy on day 1 you are going to get issues with any card. The drivers will get another update very soon, and the problems described are classic driver issues.

Installing latest drivers now Going to report back later this afternoon with some numbers

Gibbo said:

I've used Sapphire on stock bios and Asus, no problems with either BIOS at idle or load.

Changing bios switch seems to make little to no difference.

I tested with Windows 7 and drivers on CD, zero issues. Windows 8.1 is less than a week old and drivers are beta, bound to be some issues there.

Best way with these cards is to use overdrive and use following settings.
Power +50
GPU temperature target 90c
Maximum fan speed 70%

That should keep temps below 85c and not get too loud, off course case and ambient cooling will be a big factor.

Stock bios and voltage you'll get upto 5% over clock on core and upto 10-20% on memory.


The Asus BIOS and GPU tweak give a lot more OC headroom and ability to cool card more along with manual fan control. With this I'd use:-
1000 core
1225mv reduced from 1250mv
5500 memory
Fan set too 50%

That should keep things sub 80c always unless your ambient temps are very high or case cooling poor.

Click to expand...

Thanks Gibbo, will try those settings out. Are you able to send me details on where to get the ASUS bios and how to flash it? Sorry if I'm being lazy by not searching and perhaps you have already given details on this elsewhere. As the asus bios seems so superior I don't see any reason not to flash it right away and be done with it?

It's probably the drivers.

On the latest beta drivers I'll boot into Windows at a 300 core clock. It was idling happily at 38.0c for 10 minutes, even with aero. Launched Chrome, core jumped to 1000MHz, it's now 'idling' at 54.00c. I don't actually have any expectations of what is normal, not being a hardware guy, but this does seem a little odd.

I wanted to bed in with my new 8.1 install for a little while as I introduced an overlock to my 2600k when i put the 290x in, so i haven't touched uber mode.

I'm kind of thinking, we have a while before BF4 is out - i'm not going to tinker too much now, i'm going to catch up and play Infinite and Cyrsis 3 (Crysis 3 seems smooth as butter btw, even at this stock BIOS) as i haven't had a GPU in three months, so it's so nice to play games again. Perhaps in a week the picture will start to take shape, non-beta drivers etc

Just out of curiosity, is the consensus at the minute, if i bought a Sapphire i may want to be running a different BIOS?

Also when can we expect the new drivers?

LtMatt it says at those clocks even with gpu-z and afterburner off. Sitting and looking at overdrive for few minutes not going down..

Lord_ZED said:

LtMatt it says at those clocks even with gpu-z and afterburner off. Sitting and looking at overdrive for few minutes not going down..

Click to expand...

I didn't have an issue with afterburner, just gpu-z. If that doesn't work then i can't help you then mate. Have you checked other forums like Guru3d or oc.net for people with similar issues? I had a quick look last night but couldn't see anything.

LtMatt said:

See my post above. Quit using gpu-z until a new version comes out.

Click to expand...

I can confirm that uninstalling GPU-Z (or just not running it) has resolved the 100% GPU load issue - phew =D

Anyone actually played any games on it yet lol? It's destroying everything I'm throwing at it, but I guess it would do at 1080p

LtMatt ye got up at 5am and playing around with this card since then.
Those memory jumping clocks are so anoying that i cant see using this card without those profiles i made in afterburner.

If i only use overdrive and change memory clocks card will crash from this memory jumping after few minutes of reading forums.

So 2 of us have this problem both with sapphire card. Coincidence not sure.

un installing GPU Z then back soon

Running 1075/1550 with fan set to auto quiet as a mouse with target set to 90c.