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AMD R9 290X Review (Part 1)

Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights.
HKShip 2013-09-19 15-01-15-98
This game is still a system killer at these maximised settings. We test at 2560×1600.
sleeping dogs
We noticed quite a noticeable increase in frame rate when the AMD R9 290X was set into Uber Mode. Clearly there is some core clock throttling in Quiet mode as we noticed the fan was sitting constantly at 40% during this game and downclocking the core speed to compensate for the 95c threshold.

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8 comments

  1. Wow for AMD to able defeat Titan thats really something, maybe i will buy this card if its available in my country. But not AMD reference card, maybe from MSI or Gigabyte.

  2. good honest review! amazing hardware but that cooler should not be on this card – will they ever listen!

  3. Quite a few AMD favoured games in this, but good to see a few others added recently. Interesting to see the fan and cooler seem to struggle to handle the heat. Ill wait on the Vapor X model end of year and upgrade then.

  4. I am impressed with the performance., no question – its an uplift after the 280x and 270x – but the only thing is that today it seems to be only reference cards.

    Any ideas when MSI, Sapphire XFX etc will have modified versions out to buy? hope they keep them well below £500. Nvidia will drop 780 prices soon

  5. AMD reference coolers have always sucked. I remember the 4870 days when they said 105c was ok long term too and my card basically melted within 3 months. ill pass on this one until they sort out a good cooler

  6. I didnt think the TITAN cooler was that good – I wanted a modified cooler for that card from day 1. this is a fantastic solution, but it needs watercooled by the looks of it. that driver change in CCC is bonkers – no need for it, and no need to try and fool us into thinking this change is anything but a requirement to try and get the card stable at the rated speed. its not a driver ‘addition’ for any other reason.

  7. In my honest opinion the reference coolers on the 7XX cards are some the best they have done. The 290x temps warrant an aftermarket cooler for sure. Impressive performance non the less, i hope to see some great results from alternative cooling solutions.

    The 780s are out-performing the Titan with all the new drivers so i personally expected to see 290x surpass it from the get go. Lets see what AMD next! 🙂