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.
There is plenty of headroom on the core and we achieved a maximum clock speed of 1,133mhz – 16% above the OC core clocks configured by MSI. There was also plenty of headroom on the GDDR5 memory, peaking around 1,450mhz (5.8Gbps effective).
Increasing the power limit settings above 38% didn't improve the final clock speeds.
The substantial overclock ensures that the MSI R9 290 OC Gaming Edition takes the top spot in the chart, even ahead of the Palit GTX 780 Ti Jetstream.
Great card, but Sapphire are miles ahead and ive been reading some problems with the fans on these MSI cards long term. failures etc.
I have had an MSI twin frozr card for years and never had a problem with it. I think some people don’t clean their fans and coolers fairly regularly and the dust kills them. nothing to do with a bad design.
The 290 is just so much more sensible than the 290x, they are mega money for very little extra gain. AMD dropped the ball with the pricing.
I bought one last week from OC when it was on sale for £330!
Excellent timing on the review though as now I have an idea of the headroom I have for overclocking.
This R9 290 is louder, hotter and has a lower clock speed than the gigabyte R9 290, so why does this have have a higher score?
I try to configure that MSI R9 290 card for mining – problem is heat – when you ask for more than 650kH/s temperature is mre that 85 it turn off.
I find configuration with 840kH/s but iy’s working 7 minutes before turn off.
Any idea what to do?
Something interesting , the card is actually mentioned to be over clocked to 1004mhz, but it needs the MSI Gaming App (could use afterburner as well). I wish they just overclocked it to 1004mhz without the need to use that app