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

Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid. It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility.
grid2_avx 2013-10-20 11-55-24-08grid2_avx 2013-10-20 11-55-28-76grid2_avx 2013-10-20 11-55-31-58
We test at 2560×1600 with the Ultra image quality preset, as shown above. 8x MSAA was enabled to improve image quality.
grid 2 1600p
Strong results, averaging 78 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.