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7990 or 290 Crossfire, which would you choose?

Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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Right i'm messing around with my systems and left over mining gear.

I currently have two 7990s under water in my main gaming system however quadfire is horrid and has never properly worked (which I knew anyway). I also don't have the funds to spend £1000+ on a 6 core Intel CPU and monitor setup to properly make use of it so I tend to game with a single 7990, leaving the 2nd 7990 doing nothing.

Both 7990 cards clock to 1200 core and 1700 memory but that's the limits.

I also have three reference 290 cards in another system however I believe that running 2 of these in crossfire would be quicker and offer better results than a single 7990 due to hardware frame pacing. Plus the general better specs of the 290 (TrueAudio, etc) compared to the 7990 keep putting naughty thoughts into my head.

If I did swap everything around i'd end up water cooling the 290 cards to keep temps and noise down while hopefully improving the clocks.

Question is, is this all worth it? I have SuperWide monitor so not running 4k levels of quality. I do game a lot, mostly BF4, and prefer to run things medium/high just to get smoother fps. I have access to a 120Hz monitor as well.

I'd have to drain the loop, sell the 7990s for what, £400. Then either buy 290 blocks straight away and install the setup or run them on air for a while before going down the water route.

Can anyone provide any proper evidence of 290s in crossfire and what they are capable of?

Also since I know quadfire doesn't work, would an overclocked 4770k cope with 290 trifire?
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
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Can anyone provide any proper evidence of 290s in crossfire and what they are capable of?

Yes. I'm going run an absolute shedload of benchmarks using the new 14.6 drivers and i will publish my results in a few days. I will test a few of the popular synthetics and all of my games that have a built in benchmark tool. Hopefully that will give you some idea of what to expect. 1080P and 1440P. I might ask AMD if they can provide me with a nice benchmark template theme as well. :)
 
Soldato
OP
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18 Oct 2002
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Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham
Cheers Matt

I know you made a similar move, any regrets?

Just knowing that core for core the 290 are faster GPUs is bugging me, especially when they are sitting in my work PC mining when I could be gaming on them.

Forgot to say my 7990s (or one of them) has horrid coil whine though, I guess that might put people off buying them :(
 
Soldato
Joined
26 May 2009
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22,101
Don't have any charts but I sold my 7990 for £600 back at the height of the mining craze and bought a pair of 290's, the performance increase was noticeable.
 
Caporegime
Joined
12 Jul 2007
Posts
40,543
Location
United Kingdom
Cheers Matt

I know you made a similar move, any regrets?

Just knowing that core for core the 290 are faster GPUs is bugging me, especially when they are sitting in my work PC mining when I could be gaming on them.

Forgot to say my 7990s (or one of them) has horrid coil whine though, I guess that might put people off buying them :(

No regrets at all. I got my 290's for the same price as a standard reference 780Ti at the time (Xmas 13) £560. Zero coil whine on the 290's as well, its not an issue like it was on the 7990's.
 
Soldato
OP
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Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham
Just to say that the 14.6 drivers make a massive difference to my pair of (blocked) 7990s performance under crossfire - i.e. it's actually usable!

What CPU are you using? I can only get my 4770k at 4.4GHz stable it seems and with both cards in crossfire I get horrid FPS. Not that i'm complaining as a single card works ok but i've just got an itch. This is with BF4 btw, I don't really play much else.

My difficulty is... two 7990s are overkill and simply don't work for me. One 7990 is ok but why use that when I have 3x 290 which I could either split and run crossfire or (be stupid again) and run trifire.

Either way everything will be under water.
 
Associate
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23 Oct 2013
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I'm using an i7 4770k @4.6GHz; I agree in any normal situation twin 7990s are overkill, but I'm running a UHD monitor, so I've conviced myself it makes some kind of sense ;) .
 
Soldato
OP
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Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham
Ahh I only have a SuperWide monitor or 120Hz monitor.

Just want the smoothest gaming possible at decent quality settings. I tended to use low/medium in BF4 on a single 7990 to get constant 120+ fps but it just looks naff ha
 
Man of Honour
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OP first job is to get the CPU/Motherboard upgraded to a 4770k setup and then once up and running you can decide what to do with the GPUs.

Quadfire does work quite well and is getting better all the time, the system I am typing this on is a quadfire setup.
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Jul 2012
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London
He'll be using his 4770k rig, Kaap :)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but his mobo will only do trifire @x8/x8/x4, so I'd go with 2x290 unless the pcie3.0 thing helps here?
Otherwise, trifire 290's all the way based on my experience, even if it is slightly horrendous overkill :D
 
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