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To overclock the R9 290X we used AMD Catalyst Control Center and had the BIOS set to the UBER mode.
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 290X hardware. Our testing today has highlighted that the R9 290X 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 85% and the target GPU temperature at 95c.
We set the power limit settings to 15% and the GPU clock settings to a 10% increase (+100mhz to 1,100mhz). High Performance memory clock settings were also increased by 10.5%.
It is worth reiterating that the maximum fan speed needs to be increased to get any benefit from these overclocked settings – so we found 85% was a good position to ensure adequate cooling. Sadly, the noise levels were close to 44dBa under load which may not be bearable for many people. I would have a hard time living with it myself.
The clock increases deliver substantial benefits to the 3DMark 11 graphics score, increasing from 15,309 points to 16,670 points. This is around 2,600 points more than a GTX Titan at reference clock speeds.
You seem to have put dBa rating on power consumption by mistake 😛
Awesome, thanks – very very interesting!
Just an amazing card, can’t wait for the custom coolers + OC editions
Impressive performance, I can’t even get that at 1080p with my system :p
I want a 4K monitor badly, but I can only stretch to £2,000 savings. waiting patiently for this one to drop next year. fingers crossed!
Nice review, very interesting to see how things go in the future. I prefer gaming on consoles recently, but PC’s are miles ahead, lets be honest about it.
£3k for a monitor? holy crap on a stick. awesome though to drool over. I think this makes more sense long term for people as using three monitors needs such a massive desk it isn’t practical. a single monitor with super high resolution is the way forward.
Do you find some of the textures on older games look really nasty though? I bet only the latest games with tight afflliation with AMD or NVIDIA look great. Which reminds me, I need to get that batman game soon!
Did you really put 6 expensive pieces of hardware on your carpet? ..for photo purposes?
That’s fairly outrageous. Your negligence puts me at a loss for words.
@ jjj – the cards with the slot directly on the ground are actually resting on a small clear plastic sheet. The other cards are side ways on the floor, and as you might imagine the plastic coolers won’t self destruct if they touch a carpet. We appreciate your concern, but we weren’t going to bill you, don’t panic.
I was actually looking for a review on this and its just what Ineed
Amazing to see such a useful article and some idiot complaining about negligence (probably owns a HD7770 and has some serious jealousy issues!), Shame his loss for words didnt translate into his hands moving away from the keyboard.
Good review, got a lot of useful info from the results. GTX Titan is very good at this res, im sure the 6GB of memory helps in some games too.
Lovely indeed, want that monitor for sure!
well that was a great read, thanks. Wish I could afford the 290X, any news on the 290 pricing or release date yet? please?
Wow, even the 280x outperforms the GTX780 in many of the tests. It’s still early days for 4K gaming though, but definitely something I look forward to.
all the benchmarks i’ve seen so far Nvidia outperform Amd in low resolution, but as resolution increases beyond 1920×1080 ,AMD GCN outperforms Nvidia , even R7-280x pulls close to gtx 780 ,so $300 amd card matching $650 Nvidia card, wow.seems like AMD GCN is why superior to NVIDIA kepler.
just a 7970 GHz edition card notting more!
I did not take jjj comment too seriously. Provided me with a nice dose of laughter.
I’m not 100% on this but I’m pretty sure these aren’t the first AMD cards to offer crossfire without bridges… The bridges are almost an achilles’ heel anyways.