R9 290X Owners Thread

waspy88 · 8 Jun 2014 at 01:42

Do any of you have the 8GB Vapor x 290x? does it make a big difference at 4k?

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 04:17

waspy88 said:
Do any of you have the 8GB Vapor x 290x? does it make a big difference at 4k?

You are going to need at least 3 of the cards before you can start thinking about using the extra VRAM.

waspy88 · 8 Jun 2014 at 09:45

Dayum.. I can buy two of them max.

For 3 cards i'd probably need a 6 core CPU too right? My poor old 3770K will probably bottleneck.

So 2 x 290x 8GB in CF won't yield any good results ? How does it work Kaapstad. Do you need the extra horsepower for the VRAM to become useful?

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 11:15

waspy88 said:
Dayum.. I can buy two of them max.

For 3 cards i'd probably need a 6 core CPU too right? My poor old 3770K will probably bottleneck.

So 2 x 290x 8GB in CF won't yield any good results ? How does it work Kaapstad. Do you need the extra horsepower for the VRAM to become useful?

With two 8gb cards you won't have the GPU grunt to make use of it most of the time.

With three cards you may get the occasional opportunity to get over 4gb with the grunt the cards have got.

With 4 cards you can just turn everything up to max and in a handful of games you will be using about 5gb of VRAM. BF4 for example uses less than 4gb with DX11 and more than 4gb with Mantle. Crysis 3, RTW2, Skyrim modded are others that will go over 4gb.

Where it all goes wrong is when you get a badly written game that does not support CF/SLI.

Another thing to consider with 3 or 4 non ref cards is you need to look at watercooling to get the heat out of your case.

As written in another thread 3 x 290Ps would be a good compromise. I would be surprised if you need the extra AA that a 4th card would allow you to use.

As to intel Hexcores there maybe a couple of games that can make use of the extra threads.

Boomstick777 · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:51

So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

Also learned that 290X's run hot as hell in Crossfire

If only it was winter...

humbug · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:53

Boomstick777 said:
So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

Also learned that 290X's run hot as hell in Crossfire

If only it was winter...

Welcome to Mantle.

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:54

Boomstick777 said:
So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

Also learned that 290X's run hot as hell in Crossfire

If only it was winter...

Mantle for BF4 is top notch unless you want to play @4K.

thefogo · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:54

Boomstick777 said:
So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

Also learned that 290X's run hot as hell in Crossfire

If only it was winter...

What temps you hitting?

Boomstick777 · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:56

thefogo said:
What temps you hitting?

In the 80c's. They generate a lot of heat in the case. My Antec 920 is struggling to throw it all out of the back of the PC

Might have to install some fans in top of the case.

waspy88 · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:58

Thanks for the explanation Kaap

much appreciated.

Now to convince the missus I need tri-fire

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 18:59

Boomstick777 said:
In the 80c's. They generate a lot of heat in the case. My Antec 920 is struggling to throw it all out of the back of the PC

Might have to install some fans in top of the case.

I get a similar problem with my air cooled GTX 690s, the heat they throw out has to pass through the Rad used to cool the CPU meaning it is always running about 10c hotter than it could with watercooled GPUs.

thefogo · 8 Jun 2014 at 19:00

Boomstick777 said:
In the 80c's. They generate a lot of heat in the case. My Antec 920 is struggling to throw it all out of the back of the PC

Might have to install some fans in top of the case.

Yeah I had the same problem I had my two non-reference cards. My CPU temps went up quite a bit

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 19:01

waspy88 said:
Thanks for the explanation Kaap much appreciated.

Now to convince the missus I need tri-fire

You will probably need to watercool them, more so in this weather.

JediFragger · 8 Jun 2014 at 19:05

Boomstick777 said:
So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

Also learned that 290X's run hot as hell in Crossfire

If only it was winter...

Crossfire IS toasty!! I had reference cards, imagine that :eek:

I think the Tri-X cooler will stave off throttling over the Summer, it was pretty warm today! Excellent cooler tbh, more than happy with mine. Would have cost me more to get after-market cooling than I paid to switch lol, it was a no-brainer :cool:

~Mike~ · 8 Jun 2014 at 19:52

Boomstick777 said:
In the 80c's. They generate a lot of heat in the case. My Antec 920 is struggling to throw it all out of the back of the PC

Might have to install some fans in top of the case.

Are you not using the cm 690 iii?

What temps did you reach with one card?

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 20:01

JediFragger said:
Crossfire IS toasty!! I had reference cards, imagine that

I think the Tri-X cooler will stave off throttling over the Summer, it was pretty warm today! Excellent cooler tbh, more than happy with mine. Would have cost me more to get after-market cooling than I paid to switch lol, it was a no-brainer

This is toasty.

arc@css · 8 Jun 2014 at 20:05

I like the colour of the power cables.

LtMatt · 8 Jun 2014 at 20:09

Boomstick777 said:
So I have been playing with the 290X Tri X OC. Learned a couple of things..

Mantle seems to be the real deal. BF4 running under Mantle is really nice. Smooth fluid and no FPS drops.

No ****. My 290 crossfire Mantle performance annihilated my 290 crossfire DX performance.

My 290 crossfire DX performance was identical (in fps avg, frame time variance, stutter etc) with PG Tips 780 SLI DX performance. (wonder drivers)

Mantle is the real deal and its not even out of Beta. It's only going to get better. :cool:

thefogo · 8 Jun 2014 at 20:10

LtMatt said:
No ****. My 290 crossfire Mantle performance annihilated my 290 crossfire DX performance.

My 290 DX performance was identical (in fps avg, frame time variance, stutter etc) with PG Tips 780 SLI DX performance.

Mantle is the real deal and its not even out of Beta.

On a gaming site I visit semi-regularly a guy tried convincing me that Mantle gives no performance increase lol

Kaapstad · 8 Jun 2014 at 20:14

thefogo said:
On a gaming site I visit semi-regularly a guy tried convincing me that Mantle gives no performance increase lol

At normal resolutions there are very decent gains and more importantly the minimums are higher than DX11.