AMD R9 290 Review (1600P, 4K and CF)

To overclock the R9 290 today we use Catalyst Control Center in the latest BETA8 driver.

If you have read the whole review from the start then you will already be aware of AMD OverDrive changes to accommodate the new R9 290 hardware. Our testing today has highlighted that the R9 290 is a hot running card – set by default by AMD to hold at 95c, even if this means downclocking the core speed.

The higher we set the ‘maximum fan speed’ the better chance we have of holding the core clock speed at a constant 1,000mhz. We didn’t reduce the 95c ‘target GPU temperature’ as it means that the GPU core is more likely to downclock under any given circumstance.

To overclock we set the Maximum fan speed to 75% and the target GPU temperature at 95c.


We set the power limit to 26% and overclocked the GPU core by 14% achieving the 1080mhz final speed. Memory received a 6.2% increase to 1,328mhz.

The noise levels got high however, registering 43.3dBa under full load, not something I would want to live with on a regular basis. It was quite painful actually.


The overclock helped performance substantially – increasing the final graphics score from 14,004 points to 15,752 points – at these speeds, the card actually outperformed the R9 290X in UBER mode at default clock speeds.

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