R9 290X Owners Thread

marsha11 · 3 Feb 2015 at 18:20

Just about to pop my AMD cherry and get Crossfire 290x's 8gb. Hows the frame pacing with 2 cards, is there any micro stutter problems.

Which is the better of the 2.

MSI twin frozr or the Powercolor?

Divine Pain · 3 Feb 2015 at 18:59

marsha11 said:
Just about to pop my AMD cherry and get Crossfire 290x's 8gb. Hows the frame pacing with 2 cards, is there any micro stutter problems.

Which is the better of the 2.

MSI twin frozr or the Powercolor?

ive had a twin frozer card before, cools very wel. Does get loud when the fans are working hard, custom fan profiles will sort that out though. Never owned a powercolor card before so i cant comment.

Other differences is that the memory on the powercolor is factory overclocked by 400 but 10mhz slower on the core clock.

Hope that helps

deuse · 3 Feb 2015 at 19:53

I've got the in game temps to 70C. I turned the fan up to 50%. So that's me sorted

-Mike- · 3 Feb 2015 at 20:25

deuse said:
I've got the in game temps to 70C. I turned the fan up to 50%. So that's me sorted

Too noisy at 50% for me! Will get the hg10 on it and pop up some photos!

savagesam117 · 3 Feb 2015 at 20:51

Can you get a HG10 or something similar for non reference cards? I'd quite like one.

LtMatt · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:16

The reference cards have a temp and fan target within CCC. Stock is 94c and 55% fan speed. This means the card will use anything up to 55% fan speed to keep the temp at 94c. The hotter the reference cards run, the more heat they dissipate so this results in lower fan speeds. It's setup at stock to use as quiet a fan speed as possible. They are perfectly safe operating at this temp for their lifetime, though i can understand if you'd prefer to set a custom fan profile in afterburner. Or you can raise the max fan speed and lower the target temp within CCC to a limit of your choice.

-Mike- · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:19

AMDMatt said:
The reference cards have a temp and fan target within CCC. Stock is 94c and 55% fan speed. This means the card will use anything up to 55% fan speed to keep the temp at 94c. The hotter the reference cards run, the more heat they dissipate so this results in lower fan temps. They are perfectly safe operating at this temp for their lifetime, though i can understand if you'd prefer to set a custom fan profile in afterburner. Or you can raise the max fan speed and lower the target temp within CCC to a limit of your choice.

I fancy a HG10 for the lack of noise and lower temps! The card overclocks well and is putting in higher numbers than my 970 was in 3dmark!

LtMatt · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:19

Mike19 said:
I fancy a HG10 for the lack of noise and lower temps! The card overclocks well and is putting in higher numbers than my 970 was in 3dmark!

This should come as no surprise.

-Mike- · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:21

Very pleased with it Matt thanks a lot! You must have had ear defenders running four of them

Doogles · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:23

What saddens me is that AMD had a winner here but put a horrid cooler on it, that is the only bad point on my R9 290 I will remember in the future.

LtMatt · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:24

Mike19 said:
Very pleased with it Matt thanks a lot! You must have had ear defenders running four of them

A bit of fan noise never bothered me.

I used to leave them at stock fan speed (55%) and allow the cards to throttle a bit at 4k if needed to keep fps down. Once you go past 60fps on a 60hz screen there is no benefit anyway. On their own they run a lot cooler though.

Kaapstad · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:28

Mike19 said:
Very pleased with it Matt thanks a lot! You must have had ear defenders running four of them

For some reason 4 don't sound much louder than using 1 on air.

savagesam117 · 3 Feb 2015 at 21:49

I need to get myself another card and a nice 4K monitor.. I need to win the lottery.

dessimpson · 4 Feb 2015 at 00:12

Seriously underwhelmed by these 290x's. I knew running them in Crossfire might cause some issues with heat but my 970's ran perfectly in my case at about 64 degree's. The case is a corsair 600t with two rear 120mm fans for the cpu cooler. A 200mm fan at the front drawing in and another on the top extracting. I've also got another 4 fans on the side panel drawing air directly onto the GPU's.

Catzilla - Runs a single gpu
Heaven - scores 200 less than the 970's and finishes with one card at 94 degree's
FarCry 4 - Uses a single GPU
COD AW - A stuttering mess that is pretty much unplayable -Single GPU only
BF4 -Tried Mantle and it was far from smooth. Switched back to DirectX and it was much smoother. One of the cards then proceeded up to the 95 degree mark again.

Now I know you can blame the games etc etc but I even tried the latest beta drivers that are supposed to be optimised for FarCry 4.

Seriously thinking of sending them back and keeping my GTX 970's

dessimpson · 4 Feb 2015 at 00:16

Oh. Here's a couple of pictures for the Hall of Fame (shame?)

thefogo · 4 Feb 2015 at 00:30

Your top card will probably be throttling in that setup.

ChrisD. · 4 Feb 2015 at 08:00

dessimpson said:
Catzilla - Runs a single gpu
Heaven - scores 200 less than the 970's and finishes with one card at 94 degree's
FarCry 4 - Uses a single GPU
COD AW - A stuttering mess that is pretty much unplayable -Single GPU only
BF4 -Tried Mantle and it was far from smooth. Switched back to DirectX and it was much smoother. One of the cards then proceeded up to the 95 degree mark again.

Now I know you can blame the games etc etc but I even tried the latest beta drivers that are supposed to be optimised for FarCry 4.

Seriously thinking of sending them back and keeping my GTX 970's

I did say that you would have heat issues with your case.

Catzilla - who cares? It's an old benchmark that means nothing in terms of today's games. Wouldn't bother wasting your time getting it to run using two cards, even then Nvidia cards are always faster in it.
Heaven - again, another becnhmark where Nvidia cards are always faster.
FarCry 4/COD AW - I'd be wanting to find out why it is only running with one GPU. I can try COD AW tonight with both mine, but I never had any decent playable experience in the game so I don't bother playing it (plus it's crap).
BF4 - what CPU do you have now? Mantle will make the CPU work harder. As for 95 degrees, what fan profile are you using?

If my 4GB cards can keep up with and sometimes beat 980's, you have an issue somewhere, be it driver, CPU, temps etc.

My Tri X 290X's were fine when air cooled before I put water blocks on them.

old gamer · 4 Feb 2015 at 08:05

something i noticed about some of those games is i first played them with a 290 fine, then fitted a pair of 970's and again they played i fine but now i have put 290s back in i noticed a few problems so could be some conflict in amd and nvidia drivers and yes i did clear them out wiyh ddu, sort of tempted to do a fresh windows install

Kaapstad · 4 Feb 2015 at 08:12

dessimpson said:
Oh. Here's a couple of pictures for the Hall of Fame (shame?)

And added.

ChrisD. · 4 Feb 2015 at 08:30

old gamer said:
something i noticed about some of those games is i first played them with a 290 fine, then fitted a pair of 970's and again they played i fine but now i have put 290s back in i noticed a few problems so could be some conflict in amd and nvidia drivers and yes i did clear them out wiyh ddu, sort of tempted to do a fresh windows install

Des did say to me on Skype last night that he is getting lower FPS than other people in the benchmark threads in Tomb Raider, and felt as if something isn't right.