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MSI R9 290 OC Gaming Edition Review (1600p, Ultra HD 4K)

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.
valley setts
We test with the settings above both at 2560×1600.
unigine valley

valley 2014-02-26 11-24-54-24
The MSI R9 290 OC Gaming Edition manages to slightly outperform the Nvidia GTX780 Reference board, averaging 59.4 frames per second.

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8 comments

  1. Great card, but Sapphire are miles ahead and ive been reading some problems with the fans on these MSI cards long term. failures etc.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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?

  6. 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?

  7. 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