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Can finally play minecraft! Jk
- Thread starter Techen
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 12 Sep 2012
- Posts
- 11,698
- Location
- Surrey
Up to whether you have the cash to burn or not.
The reference PCB is an absolute beast and can take a ton of abuse if you keep it cool. This week i managed to max out the MSI AB sliders with little effort on my reference card. The Direct CU PCB is meant to be beefed up, so in theory it should be better for clocking but the thing is, the original PCB was never an issue clocking wise. Direct CU use Elpida memory i believe, which to be fair is not as bad as people say. You can generalize them to be worse clockers than Hynix but i have had plenty of cards with great clocking Elpida memory, including this one.
Custom cooling would at least let your cards run comfortable in extended gaming sessions. The price of it though will be more than grabbing another 290 though!
I believe EK has released the Direct CU block for the 290/290x.
The reference PCB is an absolute beast and can take a ton of abuse if you keep it cool. This week i managed to max out the MSI AB sliders with little effort on my reference card. The Direct CU PCB is meant to be beefed up, so in theory it should be better for clocking but the thing is, the original PCB was never an issue clocking wise. Direct CU use Elpida memory i believe, which to be fair is not as bad as people say. You can generalize them to be worse clockers than Hynix but i have had plenty of cards with great clocking Elpida memory, including this one.
Custom cooling would at least let your cards run comfortable in extended gaming sessions. The price of it though will be more than grabbing another 290 though!
I believe EK has released the Direct CU block for the 290/290x.
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Feb 2012
- Posts
- 6,586
Only if temps or noise bothers you mate, you wont get much more overclocking potential from custom water. I make sure my main rigs are also watercooled for noise, same reason i have a passive PSU. Really do not like the noise, my fans need to be ideally <800rpm.
Ah I don't mind fan noise so I guess I can save my money for now.