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R290 Crossfire

Fruitbooter

Fruitbooter

Fruitbooter

Associate
Joined
14 Jun 2011
Posts
371
Location
Wolverhampton
So who is running this setup then?

Had a quick look in the R290 thread so apologies if a few have posted in there!

Just wondered how you are finding the setup? Performance? Noise? Heat etc?

This is a great 'bang for buck' setup if your after serious duel card performance and obviously the 4GB or RAM is nice also. The anticipation of the AIB cards is also intense and although the price may shoot up a tad, if they get the temps down and they clock better then surly this will be a wining setup?
 
An insider on anandtech (skurge I believe) said they will be coming end of November. But seriously no news and not even a leak is making me mad waiting. This is my first PC build and I just need these two goddamn graphics cards to play a backload of games. Hell I have even taken 2 weeks off near Christmas so I can play at length. Hope these things show up soon.
 
Makes you wonder how many potental customers amd are miissing out on with this delay with custom cooler designs as people get fed up of waiting and simsimply switch to nvidea instead
 
im awaiting R290 custom and its sad how even the 780 TI custom models will be released before the R290. Not sure what AMD are doing.
 
I bet AMD want to clear out some reference stock first.

Though interestingly how many of the partner coolers will opt for a blower design I wonder? Crossfire 290's venting all that heat into the case could be a problem for an air cooled CPU...
 
EdgeDs said:
Makes you wonder how many potental customers amd are miissing out on with this delay with custom cooler designs as people get fed up of waiting and simsimply switch to nvidea instead
Click to expand...


So true, and Mantle will be supported by both AMD and Nvidia. (please correct me if I am wrong) Seems making AMD card not that 'special' anymore.
 
I've been running 290 (non-X) crossfire since Friday night, and so far the experience has been faultless.

  • performance is brilliant, currently running the 290's at stock and performance is 15% higher than with my 7970's at 1050/1500.
  • smoothness is incomparable. I was very happy with the feeling of my 7970's at 5760x1080 (remember frame pacing only works on single screens currently), but after switching to the 290's, I realised just how much micro-stuttering I'd been putting up with without realising it. It's very much like when you have your car serviced after a long time, or give the house a really good clean - I've been running Crossfired cards for so long I had forgotten how smooth gaming can be until after I'd changed and saw it again.
  • running stock fans at stock speeds, the cards honestly don't get very loud, certainly not as loud as all the forum comments made me expect it to be. Don't get me wrong, they're not silent when gaming, but equally I don't have to raise my speaker volume because of them. At desktop, they're quiet enough that I can't hear them over my case fans on their lowest setting.
  • it's weird having my GPUs run at 95C each under heavy load, but as AMD have designed the cards to operate at that, I'm comfortable with this now. Also, because the coolers are stock and eject the air straight out of my case, my CPU and HDD temperatures are actually lower than they were when I was running Accelero/FrozR coolers on my 7970's.
  • my plug-in wattage meter on the wall shows under heavy gaming (which on 3 screens with a liking for eye candy, happens quite a bit!) I am pulling 650W-700W, which is higher than the 600W-650W I was pulling with my 7970's at GHz speeds. I have seen 750W-770W during very difficult sections, such as the indoor bit on Sleeping Dogs benchmark, so I'm not overclocking until I upgrade my 750W PSU. Remember though, the rated 750W is power to the PC, not pulled from the wall (so 770W from the wall is only 654.5W of my rated 750W if the PSU is 85% efficient).

I wasn't planning on moving from 7970 CF to 290 CF, but my cards died unexpectedly so I was forced to make the jump. Now, I'm very, very happy I did. The measured performance is better, the perceived performance is night-and-day better, they're actually slightly quieter (remember, I'm not overclocking at the moment), the cards never go above 95C - which AMD have put in writing is a perfectly safe temperature to run at, and my other components are running cooler.

I'd definitely recommend at least an 850W PSU to provide a little headroom for overclocking, but they will run fine on a good quality 750W without overclocking.
 
Well i've had a 290x crossfire setup since launch, No problems running on a OCZ ZX850 psu.

Perfomance wise its ok.... but nothing fantastic, the cards will throttle quickly on air unless you up the power limits and up the fan a fair few percent.

Overclocking on a Sabertooth Z77 with a 3770k @4.5 saw diminishing returns quickly compared to just one card, but i'm putting this down to the Pci 3.0 x8 x8 rather than x16 of the single card.

The noise quickly becomes unbearable in prelonged gamig sessions so much so i need to turn my speakers up to try to drown out the noise.

My advice would be to wait for the non reference boards to show if you're going to run crossfire.
 
thefogo said:
Only 15%? That seems much lower than I would expect ;O
Click to expand...

My 7970s died unexpectedly, so I didn't take any "before" benches. The only one I have recorded is Sleeping Dogs, which I managed 100FPS on with the 7970s, and hit 115FPS with the 290s. Could well be performance differences in other games may well be higher. I will say all the gamesgames I've played feel loads better due to how smooth and fluid everything is now, but I just don't have any figures to back that up.
 
AMD didn't design them to run at 95C as they throttle at 94c to stay within that temperature, they don't go full speed at those temperatures.
 
Confused Stu said:
I've been running 290 (non-X) crossfire since Friday night, and so far the experience has been faultless.

  • performance is brilliant, currently running the 290's at stock and performance is 15% higher than with my 7970's at 1050/1500.
  • smoothness is incomparable. I was very happy with the feeling of my 7970's at 5760x1080 (remember frame pacing only works on single screens currently), but after switching to the 290's, I realised just how much micro-stuttering I'd been putting up with without realising it. It's very much like when you have your car serviced after a long time, or give the house a really good clean - I've been running Crossfired cards for so long I had forgotten how smooth gaming can be until after I'd changed and saw it again.
  • running stock fans at stock speeds, the cards honestly don't get very loud, certainly not as loud as all the forum comments made me expect it to be. Don't get me wrong, they're not silent when gaming, but equally I don't have to raise my speaker volume because of them. At desktop, they're quiet enough that I can't hear them over my case fans on their lowest setting.
  • it's weird having my GPUs run at 95C each under heavy load, but as AMD have designed the cards to operate at that, I'm comfortable with this now. Also, because the coolers are stock and eject the air straight out of my case, my CPU and HDD temperatures are actually lower than they were when I was running Accelero/FrozR coolers on my 7970's.
  • my plug-in wattage meter on the wall shows under heavy gaming (which on 3 screens with a liking for eye candy, happens quite a bit!) I am pulling 650W-700W, which is higher than the 600W-650W I was pulling with my 7970's at GHz speeds. I have seen 750W-770W during very difficult sections, such as the indoor bit on Sleeping Dogs benchmark, so I'm not overclocking until I upgrade my 750W PSU. Remember though, the rated 750W is power to the PC, not pulled from the wall (so 770W from the wall is only 654.5W of my rated 750W if the PSU is 85% efficient).

I wasn't planning on moving from 7970 CF to 290 CF, but my cards died unexpectedly so I was forced to make the jump. Now, I'm very, very happy I did. The measured performance is better, the perceived performance is night-and-day better, they're actually slightly quieter (remember, I'm not overclocking at the moment), the cards never go above 95C - which AMD have put in writing is a perfectly safe temperature to run at, and my other components are running cooler.

I'd definitely recommend at least an 850W PSU to provide a little headroom for overclocking, but they will run fine on a good quality 750W without overclocking.
Click to expand...

Thanks Stu, very helpful
 
Confused Stu said:
I've been running 290 (non-X) crossfire since Friday night, and so far the experience has been faultless.

  • performance is brilliant, currently running the 290's at stock and performance is 15% higher than with my 7970's at 1050/1500.
  • smoothness is incomparable. I was very happy with the feeling of my 7970's at 5760x1080 (remember frame pacing only works on single screens currently), but after switching to the 290's, I realised just how much micro-stuttering I'd been putting up with without realising it. It's very much like when you have your car serviced after a long time, or give the house a really good clean - I've been running Crossfired cards for so long I had forgotten how smooth gaming can be until after I'd changed and saw it again.
  • running stock fans at stock speeds, the cards honestly don't get very loud, certainly not as loud as all the forum comments made me expect it to be. Don't get me wrong, they're not silent when gaming, but equally I don't have to raise my speaker volume because of them. At desktop, they're quiet enough that I can't hear them over my case fans on their lowest setting.
  • it's weird having my GPUs run at 95C each under heavy load, but as AMD have designed the cards to operate at that, I'm comfortable with this now. Also, because the coolers are stock and eject the air straight out of my case, my CPU and HDD temperatures are actually lower than they were when I was running Accelero/FrozR coolers on my 7970's.
  • my plug-in wattage meter on the wall shows under heavy gaming (which on 3 screens with a liking for eye candy, happens quite a bit!) I am pulling 650W-700W, which is higher than the 600W-650W I was pulling with my 7970's at GHz speeds. I have seen 750W-770W during very difficult sections, such as the indoor bit on Sleeping Dogs benchmark, so I'm not overclocking until I upgrade my 750W PSU. Remember though, the rated 750W is power to the PC, not pulled from the wall (so 770W from the wall is only 654.5W of my rated 750W if the PSU is 85% efficient).

I wasn't planning on moving from 7970 CF to 290 CF, but my cards died unexpectedly so I was forced to make the jump. Now, I'm very, very happy I did. The measured performance is better, the perceived performance is night-and-day better, they're actually slightly quieter (remember, I'm not overclocking at the moment), the cards never go above 95C - which AMD have put in writing is a perfectly safe temperature to run at, and my other components are running cooler.

I'd definitely recommend at least an 850W PSU to provide a little headroom for overclocking, but they will run fine on a good quality 750W without overclocking.
Click to expand...


Thanks a lot STU - exactly the sort of feedback I was looking for. As I have mentioned I'm looking to upgrade from a 6990 for triple screen at 5760x1080.

Been looking long and hard at 7990 which can be had for £399 which should offer me roughly double the frames in most games.

The only thing making me hold off is frame pacing - as you say not currently implemented for triple screen eyefinity on 6990 and 7xxx series but supposedly built in to 290 / x. I have been looking for some measurements of frame latency of crossfire 7950/7970 or 7990 vs crossfired 290 / x but particularly at 5760 x 1080 resolution. There have been some tests on single screen or at 4k single screen but not at triple screen eyefinity (that I can find).

I would pay the extra £200 or so to ensure a smoother experience at triple screen resolution given that micro-stuttering has been a problem with the 6990 although it is helped by limiting frames in radeonpro. The 290's will also gave 4gb each rather than 3gb on 7990 which may give some headroom down the line running at that resolution.

I will be running an i7 2600K @ 4.5ghz+.

I will only have PCIe 2.0 at 8x / 8x though rather than 16x with dual GPU card like 7990 / 6990.

Really interested to read that the impression is one of smoothness as that is what I was curious about - whether it really is built into the hardware and whether it works at triple screen resolutions.

Cheers
 
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