Extensive testing shows that AMD necessarily sacrifices performance in order to force the fan to operate at or below specific rotational speed (almost certainly to guarantee a certain "quality" of experience). Should the Hawaii GPU heat up beyond the fan's ability to maintain safe operating temperatures, the card will increase fan speed even more to keep pace.
The company's stock cooling solution can keep temperatures low enough to allow for overclocking, but only if you're willing to accept louder-than-stock noise levels. Overclocking tools offer different types of fan control, and my personal favorite is MSI Afterburner.

With temperatures in check, our retail Asus Radeon R9 290X with reference cooling pushes a 12% GPU overclock and 15% memory overclock.

The GDDR5 used on retail Radeon R9 290X cards doesn’t overclock consistently, though. I’ve seen various samples of the same model facilitate anything from 1280 to 1600 MHz (a 5120 to 6400 MT/s data rate). I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, to find this specific LCS AXR9 290X sample sustaining lower clock rates, in spite of its improved GPU headroom.

The battle between exceptional memory overclocking and a better GPU frequency played out in all of our benchmarks, and the liquid-cooled card came out on top.

- Radeon R9 290X Performance Without The Noise
- An EK Block And Custom Clock Rates
- Test System And Benchmark Configuration
- The Definition Of Insanity
- Results: F1 2012 And Tomb Raider
- Results: Arma 3
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Overclocking
- Putting A Price On Silence
$100++ from GTX 780 Ti
http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#sort=a7&qq=1&c=153
It has a $150 cooler (including the back plate, etc).
Of course Asus has a special cooler too. But Asus had the opportunity to drop its price, and the 290x has indeed dropped by $50 to $100 in the past two weeks. Supply is catching up with demand.
Unfortunately for PowerColor, its LCS 290X has been out-of-stock for more than two weeks. So they get stuck with prices that are at least two weeks old, at least until someone gets new inventory and lowers their price.
Sucks to be them, they should have restocked their sellers more quickly
$100++ from GTX 780 Ti
http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/video-card/#sort=a7&qq=1&c=153
Did you happen to notice any variability under load for your core speed while overclocked on the LCS card?
I have a Sapphire Tri-X OC R9 290X that is rock solid at its stock 1040MHz, but that starts bouncing the core clock all around when any core overclocking is applied.
With my quiet fan curve, load temps top out around 85°C; well below AMD's specified throttle point of 95°C.
If your liquid cooled cards are solid at 1200MHz, I am curious if Power Tune starts to throttle in a less severe way after going above 70- or 80°C.
Odd, this happens with a +50% power limit and tested with the Metro Last Light benchmark
Thanks for confirming that your test card was not throttling; back to troubleshooting my setup!
Odd, this happens with a +50% power limit and tested with the Metro Last Light benchmark
Thanks for confirming that your test card was not throttling; back to troubleshooting my setup!
Good point; I will have to retest with a cooler fan curve.
Not sure if this will be the issue though as even a 20MHz bump to the core, and +50% power limit added to this, causes throttling with under 85°C temps.
Thanks for the thoughts!
Good point; I will have to retest with a cooler fan curve.
Not sure if this will be the issue though as even a 20MHz bump to the core, and +50% power limit added to this, causes throttling with under 85°C temps.
Thanks for the thoughts!
The card will throttle at the specified level of power consumption and/or temperature. The point at which they throttle is configurable-- If you have the card set to target 80°C or 75°C then it will throttle to maintain that temp as much as possible, while keeping in mind the power limits you've set in Powertune.
That's easy to figure out for just the cards (Graphics performance gained / graphics price increased) For the system, there is System Performance Gained / System Price Increased.
making this chart more complicated on this occasion is that the LC card needs a liquid cooler, which increases the system price by $180. So the system price structure compares [LC card + cooling system + baseline system] to [air-cooled card + baseline system].
I'm sitting here looking at a pile of flow plates for my own EK WBs, so I'm wondering which one the manufacturer decided to go with.
I'm sitting here looking at a pile of flow plates for my own EK WBs, so I'm wondering which one the manufacturer decided to go with.