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To overclock today, we used the dedicated overclocking tools within the latest version of AMD’s Catalyst Control Center. We also tested with Asus GPU Tweak, but the end results were identical.
Taking the power limit settings any further than 20% didn't help any further. The core could be overclocked by 10% before the R9 290 Direct CU II OC would hardlock. There was minimal headroom via the GDDR5 memory, topping out at around 5%.
Increasing the maximum fan speed past 60% helped to ensure that the core clock held constantly at our overclocked speeds. This does add a little extra noise, but we would imagine that the audience determined to push clocks to the limit won't be too bothered.
At the maximum manually tweaked speeds, the Asus R9 290 Direct CU II OC overtakes some of the R9 290X solutions, slotting in behind the Asus R9 290X Direct CU II OC, which scores around 100 points more.
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.