Sapphire Releases Performance-boosting BIOS for its R9-290
Sapphire has released a performance-enhancing BIOS for its R9-290 graphics cards, and given us the announcement that we've all been waiting for.
The Radeon R9-290 and Radeon R9-290X graphics cards have become known for being very powerful, though very loud as well. One of the key characteristics of the graphics cards is the way that their thermals, fan speeds and clock speeds are managed. Since the graphics cards stock coolers are not powerful enough by default to run the card at full speed, AMD's PowerTune technology will dynamically turn down the GPUs clock speed to prevent the GPU from overheating.
Previously, the default maximum fan speed that the cards operated at was 40 percent. While this still stands for the R9-290X, to give the R9-290 a performance boost, AMD had released a driver update to get the fan running at 47 percent. Now, Sapphire has done the same thing for its own R9-290, however, rather than releasing it in the form of a driver, it has released a new BIOS for the graphics card. While in practice you're unlikely to notice a difference between a driver fix or a BIOS fix, it is somewhat reassuring knowing that it is now hardcoded into the BIOS, and not ran as an override.
Furthermore, while no details were provided, Sapphire has announced that in the coming weeks it will be coming out with various different R9-290 graphics cards built on its own designs, with better cooling solutions. If you're in the market for an R9-290 card, you're probably better off waiting for custom cards to come out, unless you don't mind the hassle of slapping a big Arctic Accelero Xtreme III cooler onto it.
The way they are on the reference fan, each blade is scooping up air in a direction perpendicular to rotation and flat in the wake of the next blade in front. Maximum noise, minimum airflow. The slight blade angle change deflects the wake outwards and bites into incoming air on the inner edge. Quieter with better airflow.
An horribly flawed fan design running at 100% would be horribly noisy and not necessarily provide much extra airflow.
An horribly flawed fan design running at 100% would be horribly noisy and not necessarily provide much extra airflow.
Well you have a point there if turbulence just increases instead of increased CFM? But if it does increase air flow significantly then I think it should be an option. Power to the people
My bet is that noise would ramp up much faster than CFM does, which would be consistent with complaints about how quickly noise ramps up for little to no apparent cooling gain.
Seriously sometimes i think AMD likes to shoot itself in the foot just for the fun of it.
The heatsink itself is most likely perfectly fine. What kills it is the fan.
No, the entire thing is just horrible for these GPUs. It's the same heatsink design used on the HD4890 by AMD (excuse me, ATI) five years ago. The 4890 is a sub-200W TDP GPU, and it also suffered fan noise complaints at any setting greater than 40%. The R9 290 & 290X have TDPs much closer to 300W TDP than 200W, making the heatsink itself entirely insufficient.
Idiots.
How hard is that to do.
Idiots.