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R9 290X Owners Thread

Loads of people seem to have the black screen issue now:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1040356058&posted=1#post1040356058

I do think it's a motherboard problem, it's strange we all have similar chip sets? Has been some commonality.

ASrock have offered GREAT support and been really chatty, but can suggest no fix.

Club 3D have been great - I accidentally got bounced to their support even though i have a Sapphire because Club 3D responded in a thread i linked :) They suggest messing with the "Setup Prompt Time Out" setting on the ASrock to give the board more time to initialize. I've done this, and haven't had a crash since, but i fail to see how it can make a difference?

Sapphire - no response in 3 days.

AMD - no response in 3 days.

So, if this gets fixed somehow I'm definitely buying another ASRock board next time, and Club3D have given me better support that my actual board parter :)

Still, last night I put a 580 back in and i'm good guns. Just need to pinpoint the cause.
 
Asus Maximus VI Impact ROG (Z87)

Stock voltage/stock clocks on air.

Initially I had black screen problem seen in this youtube video


BUT it turns out that this was caused by GPU Z 0.7.3

Not had any problems since I updated it to 0.7.4...
 
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Not sure if this thread is for us lowly 290 non x owners as well :p

I got mine yesterday though and it seems to be working a treat. I'm not a crazy overclocker person or fps chaser so I haven't got many stats for you but I did try some BF4 with everything turned up and it seemed to be averaging 70-80 fps with dips to 60s and highs of 100-110. I think I'm very much CPU limited at the moment as I have a i5 Ivy bridge @ stock (I know blasphemy!). I did notice the temps shoot up straight to 90C after 5 minutes of play as well as the fan at 40% which does make a little bit of noise slightly less than my 5870 reference card.

I would say for the average gamer it might be too loud but for a budget performance gamer like myself it isn't too bad nothing that turning the volume up two notches can't drown out :D I'm sure people with better cases and such would notice the sound a lot less!

I'm pretty impressed by the card though even though I don't check out fps all that often every game I tried felt 5x more responsive!
 
nickrorschach for all we know it could be PSU related :P

It certainly isn't in my case and the constituents of the problem are fairly specific, i.e. black screen, sound looping. Quite a few of the others seem to have adequate PSUs, have checked if they are on a single rail etc
I've done a fair bit of leg work here, and i think we can start to narrow it down now.
 
Not sure if this thread is for us lowly 290 non x owners as well :p

I got mine yesterday though and it seems to be working a treat. I'm not a crazy overclocker person or fps chaser so I haven't got many stats for you but I did try some BF4 with everything turned up and it seemed to be averaging 70-80 fps with dips to 60s and highs of 100-110. I think I'm very much CPU limited at the moment as I have a i5 Ivy bridge @ stock (I know blasphemy!). I did notice the temps shoot up straight to 90C after 5 minutes of play as well as the fan at 40% which does make a little bit of noise slightly less than my 5870 reference card.

I would say for the average gamer it might be too loud but for a budget performance gamer like myself it isn't too bad nothing that turning the volume up two notches can't drown out :D I'm sure people with better cases and such would notice the sound a lot less!

I'm pretty impressed by the card though even though I don't check out fps all that often every game I tried felt 5x more responsive!

You 290 non-x owing peasants aren't welcome in this thread ;)
But on a more serious note, I've not yet overclocked mine yet either so no idea if mine suffers from the black screens after oc issues being mentioned.
 
You 290 non-x owing peasants aren't welcome in this thread ;)
But on a more serious note, I've not yet overclocked mine yet either so no idea if mine suffers from the black screens after oc issues being mentioned.

Just to be clear, lots of people are seeing the issue without an overclock.

I dont think it has anything to do with temps, or overclocks.

There may be a second issue with overclocking the card, but once you add this into the mix it could be anything.
 
A well clocked 780Ti can topple a well clocked R290X. When both on air!

On water however, that will depend, the R290X benefits far more from water than NVIDIA as it see's a much larger reduction in temperatures. :)

IMO thats because the ref- cooler on the 290/X is crap. its not that the GPU naturally runs unusually hot, it doesn't.
Put a lower end £30 after market air cooler on it and watch the temps drop 20c.
 
IMO thats because the ref- cooler on the 290/X is crap. its not that the GPU naturally runs unusually hot, it doesn't.
Put a lower end £30 after market air cooler on it and watch the temps drop 20c.

From AMD's Thracks

There's a lot of doom and gloom around the 95C temperature, because people are used to a world where the product is designed to run as cold as possible... but that's not the world we're living in with these units. The doom and gloom is based on an old viewpoint.

95C is the optimal temperature that allows the board to convert its power consumption into meaningful performance for the user. Every single component on the board is designed to run at that temperature throughout the lifetime of the product.

If you throttle the temperature down below that threshold, then the board must in turn consume less power to respect the new temperature limit. Consuming less power means lowering vcore and engine clock, which means less performance.

You want to take full advantage of product TDP to maximize performance, and that is accomplished with a 95C ideal operating temperature for the 290 and 290X.
 
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