Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2009
- Posts
- 2,727
- Location
- Gillingham, Kent
It's not exactly a secret that there's a little bias in the GPU section of the forum - whether it's AMD owners slating Nvidia, or vice versa. I would like to have a thread with only honest and (as near as possible) unbiased opinions are available in one place. It may well the two bottles of wine I've polished off in the past hour, but there you go! 
Could I please respectfully ask that you only post in this thread if you actually own the card(s) you're commenting on.
I currently own 290's in crossfire, coming from 7970's in crossfire (that broke due to my trying to replace coolers ham fistedly).
My 290's run every game I've tried brilliantly at 5760x1080. They produce slightly better frame rates (about 10%-15% at stock) than my 7970's did, but also pull more power from the wall - my wall meter says 700-750W at stock rather than 600-600W with the 7970s at 1050/1500. The main difference for me though has been smoothness, I hadn't realised how much stuttering I'd put up with using the 7970's until I changed over, the same frame rate in Just Cause 2 (my main game) feels ridiculously smooth. The downside of the 290's is the increased noise over the 7970's, but it's not as bad as I believed it would from the reviews and comments. It's louder than my 7970's were (one an MSI Twin Frozr, one an Accelero 7970), but it's not intrusive at all once you're playing a game. It's about as loud as I remember my launch week 7970 being before I changed the cooler to an Accelero. The noise is a little like a normal quiet road car on the motorway, it's there but easily tuned out and not disruptive to me, other people's opinion will differ. The 94C running temp took a while to sit well with me, I'm used to worrying if my GPU goes over 75C. Once I'd got my head around that the GPU goes to 94C before the fan increased, and that AMD have stated the GPU is designed to run at 95C without issue, I was happier to simply let the cards do their thing. I've altered my fan speed in CCC to allow it to hit 100% before throttling the cards if required, and my cards don't go higher than 55%ish while maintaining 945MHz on the core. Due to the cooler design, the hot air is ejected outside the case rather than recycled in it, so my CPU, HDD, and other sensors are running cooler than my 7970's despite the GPUs running hotter.
The main benefit from my moving from 7970's to 290's is that frame pacing is now working for me at 5760x1080. Gaming is a lot smoother with 290's than it was with 7970's in my personal experience. The downside is the higher power consumption than with my 7970's, and the higher GPU core temp, but as I've said, this was more an issue with me getting my head around how the core temp/fan speed dynamic worked on this card, and believing AMD when they say the card is designed to run at these temperatures.
What card(s) are you running, and what's your honest opinion of it/them?
Could I please respectfully ask that you only post in this thread if you actually own the card(s) you're commenting on.
I currently own 290's in crossfire, coming from 7970's in crossfire (that broke due to my trying to replace coolers ham fistedly).
My 290's run every game I've tried brilliantly at 5760x1080. They produce slightly better frame rates (about 10%-15% at stock) than my 7970's did, but also pull more power from the wall - my wall meter says 700-750W at stock rather than 600-600W with the 7970s at 1050/1500. The main difference for me though has been smoothness, I hadn't realised how much stuttering I'd put up with using the 7970's until I changed over, the same frame rate in Just Cause 2 (my main game) feels ridiculously smooth. The downside of the 290's is the increased noise over the 7970's, but it's not as bad as I believed it would from the reviews and comments. It's louder than my 7970's were (one an MSI Twin Frozr, one an Accelero 7970), but it's not intrusive at all once you're playing a game. It's about as loud as I remember my launch week 7970 being before I changed the cooler to an Accelero. The noise is a little like a normal quiet road car on the motorway, it's there but easily tuned out and not disruptive to me, other people's opinion will differ. The 94C running temp took a while to sit well with me, I'm used to worrying if my GPU goes over 75C. Once I'd got my head around that the GPU goes to 94C before the fan increased, and that AMD have stated the GPU is designed to run at 95C without issue, I was happier to simply let the cards do their thing. I've altered my fan speed in CCC to allow it to hit 100% before throttling the cards if required, and my cards don't go higher than 55%ish while maintaining 945MHz on the core. Due to the cooler design, the hot air is ejected outside the case rather than recycled in it, so my CPU, HDD, and other sensors are running cooler than my 7970's despite the GPUs running hotter.
The main benefit from my moving from 7970's to 290's is that frame pacing is now working for me at 5760x1080. Gaming is a lot smoother with 290's than it was with 7970's in my personal experience. The downside is the higher power consumption than with my 7970's, and the higher GPU core temp, but as I've said, this was more an issue with me getting my head around how the core temp/fan speed dynamic worked on this card, and believing AMD when they say the card is designed to run at these temperatures.
What card(s) are you running, and what's your honest opinion of it/them?
