AMD Radeon R9 290X with Hawaii GPU pictured, has 512-bit 4GB Memory

sin · 22 Sep 2013 at 02:27

$599=£373.93+****VAT=£74.79=£448.72=over priced

shankly1985 · 22 Sep 2013 at 02:59

sin said:
$599=£373.93+****VAT=£74.79=£448.72=over priced

Not over-priced if its beating a Titan. Its a superb deal.

Neoni · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:05

shankly1985 said:
Not over-priced if its beating a Titan. Its a superb deal.

IF it beats a titan, its still a hell of a lot of money for a new card.. in my eyes anyway.

sin · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:06

$599=£373.93 now thats good deal
Not £448.72

Boomstick777 · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:07

Trading blows with the Titan at stock, pretty impressive. Now want to see Overclocked results, GK110, '780 / Titan' can clock very high, and performance scales very nicely. If Hawaii can clock just as well, AMD are onto a winner, I hope this means price drops rather than keeping prices artificially high. What's the betting some of these 290X's come in at £500, still to expensive for a single GPU imho. Not sure the performance is enough to tempt me from a 780 though, maybe with overclocking the gap will be larger..

spixelspixel · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:07

$599 means it will be €599 = £506 but UK prices are always more expensive so I guess somewhere closer to £550 launch price.

Boomstick777 · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:09

sin said:
$599=£373.93 now thats good deal
Not £448.72

Add VAT and you get circa £450. These cards aren't going to be cheap at launch. Better off waiting a while for price drops, I bet within a couple months they are under £400..

Boomstick777 · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:20

Performance is trading blows with Titan on some titles and beating it soundly in many others, while having similar power use and on a smaller die size, got to say this is impressive if legit. Considering that the Radeon has all that compute power, and lot's of vram.. The power use is very good.

Saitex · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:20

Hopefully this ain't another bs hype which will lead to a severe disappointment and will actually come true, in which case I will be feeling pretty happy that I didn't jump the train and got a 7990.

Orangey · 22 Sep 2013 at 03:23

Ugh, wccf still pushing the incorrect info about die size...

If the rest is true, quite impressive on launch drivers. Also note how Hawaii outpaces Titan with AA every time.

LtMatt · 22 Sep 2013 at 07:52

Orangey said:
Ugh, wccf still pushing the incorrect info about die size...

If the rest is true, quite impressive on launch drivers. Also note how Hawaii outpaces Titan with AA every time.

512bit bus.

Its why the 7950/70 outshine a 670/680/760/770 at high resolution/high AA settings.

EDIT

This card is going to overclock like a champ. The memory at only 1250 is going to have massive overclock potential.

gpuerrilla · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:02

Just needs a sensible market price now to shake the market and drive some prices down!

sieze2 · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:05

Awesome, bring on Wednesday !

Buckster · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:07

I have a feeling this card is going to love high res + lots of AA

fantastic

Kaapstad · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:14

LtMatt said:
512bit bus.

Its why the 7950/70 outshine a 670/680/760/770 at high resolution/high AA settings.

EDIT

This card is going to overclock like a champ. The memory at only 1250 is going to have massive overclock potential.

There is something rather odd about vram clocked as low as 1250 on a high end GPU, even the Titan with its 6gb comes in @1502.

LtMatt · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:20

Kaapstad said:
There is something rather odd about vram clocked as low as 1250 on a high end GPU, even the Titan with its 6gb comes in @1502.

Kinda makes sense with a 512bit bus though. It doesn't need to be clocked as high. 512bit at 1250=288GB - 7970ghz 384 bit at 1500=299GB. The 7970 was definitely not short of memory bandwidth. Looks like it will be even less of a problem here. Hynix memory, always good for 1700-1900mhz with golden chips reaching 1900-2000.

RetrogamerX · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:23

LtMatt said:
Kinda makes sense with a 512bit bus though. It doesn't need to be clocked as high. 512bit at 1250=288GB - 7970ghz 384 bit at 1500=299GB. The 7970 was definitely not short of memory bandwidth. Looks like it will be even less of a problem here. Hynix memory. Always good for 1700-1900mhz with golden chips reaching 1900-2000.

We'll see mat. Don't get too excited just yet. Want to see benches on these new cards. I'll chuckle if their not much faster then what's out now.

Marine-RX179 · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:24

sin said:
$599=£373.93+****VAT=£74.79=£448.72=over priced

You forgetting one thing though. If those result for the top card Hawaii XT beating Titan is indeed true, it would mean AMD's 2nd card down the Hawaii Pro would be beating the GTX780 at sub £400 price range.

But of course, all the pricing and performance are just guess work/rumors, best wait for NDA get lifted and the dust get settled...

LtMatt said:
Kinda makes sense with a 512bit bus though. It doesn't need to be clocked as high. 512bit at 1250=288GB - 7970ghz 384 bit at 1500=299GB. The 7970 was definitely not short of memory bandwidth. Looks like it will be even less of a problem here. Hynix memory, always good for 1700-1900mhz with golden chips reaching 1900-2000.

I think there's always a misconception for many people thinking about memory bandwidth in the sense like vram which can run out, when they are actually more like core clock the higher the better; the core clock is for pushing the raw frame rate up, whereas the memory bandwidth speed is for reduce the amount of frame rate drop when applying graphic settings that are memory intensive such as MSAA and SSAA etc- basically the higher the memory bandwidth, the lesser frame rate drop when using AA etc. It is a case of the higher the better (that actually make a difference to performance...unlike more vram), rather than the case of having "enough" or not.

Nvidia had a history of losing less frame rate on application of AA than AMD/ATI is the pass because of their higher memory bandwidth with the 384-bus vs ATI/AMD's 256-bit bus, but with the 600 series, the two camp's position swapped in this aspect.

The main effect of having higher memory bandwidth is to reduce the amount of performance hit when using memory intensive features, such as MSAA, Super Sampling AA, ubersampling etc for example. Despite many people claiming the Nvidia 256-bit cards being equal to the AMD 384-bit cards for games in general, it is quite clear that the lower memory bandwidth cause FAR greater performance drop on the Nvidia cards with the much lower memory bandwidth in games such as Metro2033, and using graphic options such as using Extreme AA (think it's SuperSampling) in Sleeping Dog and UberSampling in Witcher 2 etc.

Kaapstad · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:30

LtMatt said:
Kinda makes sense with a 512bit bus though. It doesn't need to be clocked as high. 512bit at 1250=288GB - 7970ghz 384 bit at 1500=299GB. The 7970 was definitely not short of memory bandwidth. Looks like it will be even less of a problem here. Hynix memory, always good for 1700-1900mhz with golden chips reaching 1900-2000.

Looking forward to the reviews, but the only thing I am really interested in is the overclocking headroom.

It is easy these days to produce a GTX 780 that off the shelf is faster than a Titan but when it comes to overclocking both, the result is reversed with the Titan coming out on top.

If the R9 290X has decent overclocking headroom and can produce the numbers then there maybe some headed my way.

I have one of these on order at the moment

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-587-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2174

So it will be interesting to see what ends up in it.

LtMatt · 22 Sep 2013 at 09:35

8 Pack said:
Beats Titan by a few percent??

RetrogamerX said:
We'll see mat. Don't get too excited just yet. Want to see benches on these new cards. I'll chuckle if their not much faster then what's out now.

Kaapstad said:
Looking forward to the reviews, but the only thing I am really interested in is the overclocking headroom.

It is easy these days to produce a GTX 780 that off the shelf is faster than a Titan but when it comes to overclocking both, the result is reversed with the Titan coming out on top.

If the R9 290X has decent overclocking headroom and can produce the numbers then there maybe some headed my way.

I have one of these on order at the moment

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-587-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2174

So it will be interesting to see what ends up in it.

LtMatt said:
Right im throwing my hat into the ring. Titan beating performance at $550+. You heard it here first folks. I may or may not have heard it from someone else.

I called it a long time ago. Looks like my pricing won't be too far off either.