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** MY REVIEW: ASUS 290X DC2 vs ASUS 290X REFERENCE!! **

Daftbrown said:
And no mention of the Gigabyte Windforce 290/X?
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I've been very happy with my Windforce 290X.

Runs at 1,110 / 1,480 artifact free on default voltage and is very quiet with no throttling at all and no black screens.

With a slight increase in volts I can run it at 1,170 / 1,550 (haven't tried higher yet).

This is enough for a score of around 11,000 in 3dMark Firestrike and over 5,500 in Firestrike Extreme.

More than happy :)
 
Daftbrown said:
And no mention of the Gigabyte Windforce 290/X?
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Its not a card I would buy in my honest opinion. As a gaming card it is superb, but I enjoy overclocking and mining, traits which the Gigabyte does not do so well, due to Elpida memory and the cards cooler being a little under-powered for miners or overclockers.

We sell all the cards and I am just trying to be honest, its just not a card for me. For me its either Sapphire Tri-X or Asus DC2, right now steering towards Sapphire due to Hynix memory and such a versatile powerful cooler.
 
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Hi there

Here are the cooler test and benchmark results:-


Crypto-Mining - Asus DC2 with 100% fan which is not that loud

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Crypto-Mining - Asus reference with 100% fan, stupidly LOUD!

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Crypto-Mining - Asus reference with 55% fan, still louder than Asus DC2 fan at 100%

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What does this tell you? Well it tells you the DC2 cooler is bloody excellent, its vastly quieter than reference cooler but also far more powerful. For everyones info I can reduce the DC2 fan speed down to 50% under mining and still remain under 90c, this is very close to being very quiet indeed. The reference card will over-heat with anything less than 55% which is louder than the DC2 fan at 100%.
In short the DC2 cooler is not only extremely efficient due to superb fans, but its cooler is also very powerful as well. :)











Heaven stock results Reference VS DC2

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Heaven OC Results (Reference @ 1200/6200 VS DC2 @ 1200/6500)

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You can see the DC2 card is a few FPS faster at stock, simply because it comes at higher clock speeds out of the box. Overclocked the DC2 still has a small lead over the reference due to a 300MHz superior memory overclock, but at 1080P it only gives a marginal improvement in performance. Overclocking in general gives very good gains on both cards and I'd recommend a gaming overclock on the DC2 of 1100-1150MHz core and 6000MHz memory, for a decent 10% or so performance boost.
 
Hi there

We've just had stock land as well making us the ONLY UK Etailor with stock. :)



Asus Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card - Red/Gold @ £529.99 inc VAT

GX-330-AS_400.jpg


The new card benefits from exclusive ASUS GPU Tweak, an easy-to-use tuning tool for instant performance boosts, 4GB of super-fast GDDR5 memory for the best gaming experience at the highest resolutions, and incorporates AMD Eyefinity and TrueAudio technologies to enable expansive multi-display setups and bring in-game audio to life with more accurate environmental sounds.

R9 290X also includes support for both DirectX® 11.2 and AMD's new Mantle application programming interface (API) for great handling of even the most-demanding PC games and includes a free full game - the brilliant Battlefield 4™ from EA Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment™ (DICE).

The new ASUS R9 290X has a unique advantage in the shape of GPU Tweak, an exclusive ASUS tool that helps users to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the Radeon R9 290X GPU. This includes the ability to control finely GPU and video-memory clock speeds and voltages, cooling-fan speeds and power-consumption thresholds - so overclocking is both made easy and can be carried out with high confidence.

R9 290X is equipped with 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory, allowing gamers to push their favorite titles much further by upping in-game visuals to maximum resolutions. The new card also includes AMD Eyefinity technology to broaden the gaming landscape, so gamers can expand the playing field across up to six independent displays, via DisplayPort or DVI.

Specification:-
- GPU: Hawaii XT
- Litecoin Hash Rate: 850-1000
- Stream Processors: 2816
- ROPS: 64
- Core Speed: 1050MHz
- Memory Speed: 5400Mhz
- Memory interface: 512-Bit
- Memory capacity: 4096MB GDDR5
- PCI-Express X16 lane required
- 600W or greater PSU required
- Power Connectors: 8-pin + 6-pin required
- Display Outputs: 2x Dual Link DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort
- Warranty: 3yr


Only £529.99 inc VAT.

ORDER NOW
 
Gr8 review Gibbo. You mentioned that it wasn't very fond of higher volts so do You reckon if it could be in any way more malleable with those more aggressive Asus ref bioses? :)

Also for some reason Asus chose not to cool those vrm2 (responsible for vram volts supply), which introduces some crazy temps (126c seen in vrzone review). So does Your temp findings echo with those numbers from Vrzone?

q34Dj9s.jpg
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And overall DCU2 seems missing some decent cooling mojo thus deffo needs h2o block, plus Hynix vram wouldn't hurt for sure. :)
 
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I shall check VRAM temps this weekend, as I've left this card in my home PC, I like it a lot, so shall set it running Heaven for a few hours and see what temp the VRM's get upto. Under mining they seem fine though, so maybe was an issue on press samples? My card is a production card intended to be sold to end-users, is maybe the difference. So we shall see. :)
 
Gibbo said:
Its not a card I would buy in my honest opinion. As a gaming card it is superb, but I enjoy overclocking and mining, traits which the Gigabyte does not do so well, due to Elpida memory and the cards cooler being a little under-powered for miners or overclockers.

We sell all the cards and I am just trying to be honest, its just not a card for me. For me its either Sapphire Tri-X or Asus DC2, right now steering towards Sapphire due to Hynix memory and such a versatile powerful cooler.
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@Gibbo what CPU were you using for your tests

Here is one I have just run on a ref Asus 290X with Hynix memory and waterblock @1200/6500

4930k @4.7

4lqx.jpg


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Kaaapstad

I failed to mention this, my bad, my home PC is an FX-9590 running at stock, which is far slower in Heaven benchmarks compared to Intel CPU's. Sorry for forgetting to mention this.

I did run the DC2 and reference in Crossfire together, but the score hardly improved, 4000 points, which basically just shows how under-powered the 9590 FX is for benchmarking. :(
 
Gibbo said:
Kaaapstad

I failed to mention this, my bad, my home PC is an FX-9590 running at stock, which is far slower in Heaven benchmarks compared to Intel CPU's. Sorry for forgetting to mention this.

I did run the DC2 and reference in Crossfire together, but the score hardly improved, 4000 points, which basically just shows how under-powered the 9590 FX is for benchmarking. :(
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Taking into account the CPUs by the look of it clock for clock the 290Xs perform about the same on air or water.:)
 
Gibbo said:
My Asus 290X reference at home before would only benchmark upto 6200MHz and was only game stable and black screen free upto around 5800-6000MHz. Asus released a new BIOS and I can now game upto 6200MHz and benchmark upto 6500Mhz.

So I personally feel that the issue is a mix of BIOS not correctly optimised for the memory fitted to the cards and drivers/software patches not correctly optimised for Hawaii architecture.
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So for my VTX290 which is the OcUK unlocked to the 290x with the Asus bios, would it worth me to update the bios with a more up-to-date Asus 290x bios?
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
So for my VTX290 which is the OcUK unlocked to the 290x with the Asus bios, would it worth me to update the bios with a more up-to-date Asus 290x bios?
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Try it for sure, gave a nice improvement for me with Elpida RAM. :)

Backup your original BIOS first with GPU-z and then try the different Asus reference 290X BIOS's and test each one and see which is best for you. :)
 
Gibbo said:
Try it for sure, gave a nice improvement for me with Elpida RAM. :)

Backup your original BIOS first with GPU-z and then try the different Asus reference 290X BIOS's and test each one and see which is best for you. :)
Click to expand...
Any chance pointing me the right direction to the latest Asus reference 290x bios?
 
Gibbo said:
Use this one, it's actually written by AMD and is latest version:-
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/150652/asus-r9290x-4096-131003.html

This works on Asus reference but you will/might loose ability to push pass 1.35v if your benching.
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Thanks. 1.35v is fine by me. I typically don't use more than +100mV anyway, as I find the vrm temp is a bit too high for my liking (3rd party cooler does a good job taming the GPU temp, but the tradeoff is it doesn't cool the vrm as good as the reference cooler).
 
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Rasch said:
Yes i use the Tri-X bios too and i find it the best and they have better uefi support too.Had some bad ass memory clocks with it.
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Yes it is very good!

But you must only use it on cards which are AMD reference built, so same board, same VRM's, same memory controller.

Use it on something like an MSI Gaming or Asus DC2 and it will blow their VRM's sky high.
 
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