KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
AMD have just released a new beta driver for the R9 290 series. They issued an email today which reads …
“We’ve identified that there’s variability in fan speeds across AMD R9 290 series boards. This variability in fan speed translates into variability of the cooling capacity of the fan-sink.
The flexibility of AMD PowerTune technology enables us to correct this variability in a driver update. This update will normalize the fan RPMs to the correct values.
The correct target RPM values are 2200RPM for the AMD Radeon R9 290X ‘Quiet mode’, and 2650RPM for the R9 290. You can verify these in GPU-Z.”
If you have already bought one of these cards, then the link to the new Catalyst 13.11 Beta 9.2 driver is now available. You can download it here.
Kitguru says: AMD's early battle against their poorly thought out reference cooler continues.
I love AMD but really they are behind on the times GPU cooling wise… these powerful 3GB+ GDDR5 cards can’t last long with a single cooler.
The baring used on the cooler will fail within a year and give the owner some serious temp issue’s..
I know this from what happened to my card the HD 7970… got to the point where I had to run at 100% fan speed whenever I played a game else it would go over 90-100C.. I could feel my room temp rising on my skin every second of playing games until I had enough and sent it in to get looked at.
The guy mentioned the coolers baring had gone because of the high fan speeds so I was forced to get a replacement cooler or upgrade to Artitic Accello Extreme 7970 Cooler put onto it which I have now done… 3 fans.. no temp issue’s.. Full load = 55C
So listen to me…if you buy an AMD card with a single tiny fan.. you will need to eventually spend 100-200 on a cooler within a year or get it repaired where you bought it so keep that payment slip!