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Asus R9 290 Direct CU II OC Review (1600p, Ultra HD 4K)

Total War ROME 2 is the eighth stand alone game in the Total War series, it is the successor to the successful Rome: Total War title. The Warscape Engine powers the visuals of the game and the new unit cameras will allow players to focus on individual soldiers on the battlefield, which in itself may contain thousands of combatants at a time. Creative Assembly has stated that they wish to bring out the more human side of war this way, with soldiers reacting with horror as their comrades get killed around them and officers inspiring their men with heroic speeches before siege towers hit the walls of the enemy city. This will be realised using facial animations for individual units, adding a feel of horror and realism to the battles.
rome2 2013-10-25 13-13-46-20rome2 2013-10-25 13-13-49-56
We test at 4K – 3840×2160 with the Very High Preset selected, as shown in the screenshots above.
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rome 2 4k
A smooth experience at Ultra HD 4K, averaging over 40 frames per second.

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5 comments

  1. Why would they move the VRM sensor to a place that is going to report hot results? surely thats an engineer foobar?

  2. Terrible Terrance

    Sapphire rule the AMD roost, because they always do a proper design – and they don’t make nvidia boards either.

    I read this review as ASUS cut corners, and have a cooler which isn’t quite at the same level as their competitors. I love their motherboards, but wonder about some of their design decisions once they move to other products.

  3. So the VRM temp sensor doesn’t actually reflect the VRM’s true temperature.
    The Cooler itself doesn’t fully cover the gpu (3 of 5 pipes at best it looked like?)
    And they are using poorer quality Elpida memory modules, which are well known to be a source of the black screen crashes on the 290 series cards, over the far more stable Hynix modules that sapphire/gigabyte/msi use?

    And all of this comes at a serious price premium (£529.99 on ocuk atm vs £439.99 for the gigabyte and £449.99 for the msi versions, which both offer better hardware).

    How is this an 8/10 card? Closer to 4/10 surely given the poor decisions made and the price point compared to rival cards.

  4. Not sure where you are getting the prices from, its £389.99 http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-334-AS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1752.

    Unless you are looking at the 290x cards and getting mixed up.

  5. My bad, you’re right there.

    Nevertheless, the rest stands for all versions of the 290’s, and it still sits at a ~10% price premium vs other cards of its type, while still having the same hardware flaws. It’s just more pronounced with the X version.