After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far.
We use the ULTIMATE profile shown above and test at 2560×1600.
This is a great looking game, especially at 1600p. No problems powering the engine at all.
Why would they move the VRM sensor to a place that is going to report hot results? surely thats an engineer foobar?
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.
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.
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.
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.