AMD R9 290X Review (Ultra HD 4K testing – Part 2)

AMD's R9 290X is a powerhouse graphics card able to drive many of the latest Direct X 11 titles at the native UltraHD 4K resolution of 3840×2160, even with the eye candy at very high settings.

Part 1 of our review last week highlighted that the R9 290X was able to outperform the Nvidia GTX 780 and Nvidia GTX Titan at 2560×1600 and nothing has changed at 4K Ultra HD. The 2,816 Stream processors, 64 ROPS and 176 TMU's with 512 bit memory interface ensure it can outclass any of the other solutions on test today.

There is no doubt that the R9 290X is designed to deliver smooth frame rates at Ultra HD 4K resolutions. Buying a R9 290X to game at 1080p seems completely overkill to us.

Right now the cost of a good 4K monitor is prohibitive and very few people will be able to afford one, although prices will surely drop in 2014. We have recently added the £3,000 ASUS PQ321QE 31.5 inch 4K monitor into our labs and there is no doubt that gaming at this resolution is mindblowing.

The latest Direct X 11 titles such as Batman Arkham Origins really do look stunning at a 3840×2160 resolution. Having spent some time recently with the Playstation 3 title and moving to the PC version at 4K is such a dramatic improvement that you really do need to see it to appreciate the differences. Playing this title at 4K with a GTX Titan, GTX780 or R9 290X is almost a religious experience.

If you have been reading this article, without prior knowledge of ‘Part 1' published on KitGuru last week, then we do need to address R9 290X cooler concerns. AMD told us ‘Be assured, that 95C is a perfectly safe temperature at which the GPU can operate for its entire life. There is no technical reason to reduce the target temperature below 95C.’

Another week has passed but my opinion certainly hasn't changed. I doubt the hardware will fail anytime soon, but lower temperatures will certain help to prolong the life of the hardware. Having all that heat dumped into a case certainly won't help either, so good airflow and cable management is a must.

We appreciate that the end user can adjust settings within Catalyst Control Center, but the reference cooler can get very loud if you increase the fan speed significantly, so you are either going to be dealing with lower fan speeds and core clock reductions, or substantial fan noise with higher frame rate performance. In the default ‘Quiet mode’ with the fan limited to a maximum of 40%, we can see the AMD software downclocking the core in some games we tested, as well as benchmarks such as 3DMark. Furmark may be a synthetic stress test, but it was a good indication of how this algorithm is working – dropping the core clock speed by up to 300mhz. This is why we only tested today at 4K with the UBER bios setting.

Cutting through all the spin its easy to work out that if the reference cooler can’t maintain a 95c load limit at a specific fan speed, the core clock will drop and performance penalties will occur. Switching to UBER mode does negate many of the issues, as the fan speed increases to a 55% max threshold and therefore gives the software a wider scope to maintain the full 1GHZ core clock speed.

If AMD had spent less time developing software settings and more time creating a new, better reference cooler. This could have meant a constant 1GHZ clock speed, even at lower fan settings. We think Sapphire are leading the way right now, with their class leading Tri cooler featured on the superb R9 280X Toxic Edition. This cooler incorporates massive 10mm heatpipes and holds a gaming load temperature of 64C.

The somewhat disappointing cooler is the only reason that the AMD R9 290X doesn't earn our ‘MUST HAVE' award. We are confident that partners such as Sapphire, MSI and ASUS will release much improved custom versions of the 290X in the coming months, but until then we can only hope that the improved coolers mean that fan noise will be reduced, while a constant core clock of 1GHZ is held at all times.

There is no doubt that if you are in the market for a graphics card to game at Ultra HD 4k resolutions then AMD's R9 290X is simply the best that money can buy. While 290X stocks have yet to filter into the UK en masse, the competitive pricing between £400 and £450 is very tempting. We would still wait on the custom cooled partner cards however, which hopefully will be released within the next month.

Pros:

• Amazing 4K gaming performance.
• Outclasses the Nvidia parts
• very competitive pricing.

Cons:

• Reference cooler is not impressive.
• temperatures of 95c are high.
• QUIET mode will inflict performance penalties.

Kitguru says: AMDs R9 290X is the market leader for 4K gaming.

Become a Patron!