AMD R9 290X Review (Part 1)

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell October 24, 2013 Graphics, Highlights-new

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

We test with the settings above both at 2560×1600.

Again we can see that in the ‘Quiet' BIOS position that the software is actively downclocking the core speed to maintain a temperature of 95c. The average frame rate score increases from 58 frames per second to 63.3 frames per second when we switch to the UBER BIOS setting.

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8 comments

Fernando
October 24, 2013 at 5:47 am

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.
Hank
October 24, 2013 at 8:09 am

good honest review! amazing hardware but that cooler should not be on this card – will they ever listen!
Harris
October 24, 2013 at 8:10 am

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.
Tttt
October 24, 2013 at 8:12 am

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
Joe
October 24, 2013 at 8:14 am

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
Felix English
October 24, 2013 at 8:17 am

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.
Ken Bevis
October 24, 2013 at 6:25 pm

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! 🙂