Benchmark System and Software
When I wrote Seven Radeon R9 280X Graphics Cards, Rounded-Up, I made the assumption that most of our readers would know that gaming performance would correlate to clock rates, and focused most of my efforts on power, heat, and noise. We heard the feedback from that piece, though, and incorporated benchmark results into today's story.
I ran four carefully-selected titles at their highest quality settings, and then normalized and added the results. This yielded a performance index with AMD's Radeon R9 290 reference card serving as the 100-percent baseline.

| CPU And Cooler | Intel Core i7-3770K (Ivy Bridge) at 4.5 GHz Corsair H100i Compact Water Cooler (Gelid GC Extreme) |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | Gigabyte G1. Sniper 3 (Z77 Express) |
| Memory | 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR3-2133 |
| SSD | 2 x Corsair Neutron 480 GB |
| Power Supply | Corsair AX1200i |
| Operating System | Windows 7 x64 Ultimate SP1 |
| Drivers | AMD Catalyst 13.12 GeForce 331.82 |
| Benchmarks | Metro: Last Light BioShock Infinite Battlefield 4 (Single-Player) Crysis 3 (DirectX 11) |
We warmed up each graphics card until it reached its peak temperature, keeping us as close as possible to real-world performance and to prevent unfair advantages for either AMD or Nvidia due to artificially high boost speeds. The cards were tested on an open bench table (blue bars) and in a closed mid-tower (red bars).

- Cooling The Radeon R9 290 And 290X
- Technical Specifications
- Dimensions And Weight
- Gaming Power Consumption
- Gaming Performance
- Temperatures
- Noise And Fan Speed
- Video Comparison
- Sapphire Tri-X OC R9 290
- Gigabyte GV-R929OC-4GD R9 290 Windforce OC
- Radeon R9 290 + Arctic Accelero Extreme III
- Asus R9290X-DC2OC-4GD5 R9 290X DirectCU II OC
- HIS R9 290X IceQ X² Turbo
- Gigabyte GV-R929XOC-4GD R9 290X Windforce OC
- MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G
- Sapphire Tri-X OC R9 290X
I would like to know this more precisely please... I can't found any rage in my articles, only a chip with a very high temperature density and a lot of unusable coolers because the engineers were not able to build a matching cooler for this cards. This high density will be a global problem for all next-gen chips too. Without a vapor chamber this won't work.
Coupled with other recent reviews, Sapphire's Tri-X OC series looks to be great cards, especially when you make a custom fan curve to further reduce idle and load noise.
I can not wait to see the 20nm updates, especially if AMD gets around to pulling a Titan with their reference coolers!
I would like to know this more precisely please... I can't found any rage in my articles, only a chip with a very high temperature density and a lot of unusable coolers because the engineers were not able to build a matching cooler for this cards. This high density will be a global problem for all next-gen chips too. Without a vapor chamber this won't work.
Coupled with other recent reviews, Sapphire's Tri-X OC series looks to be great cards, especially when you make a custom fan curve to further reduce idle and load noise.
I can not wait to see the 20nm updates, especially if AMD gets around to pulling a Titan with their reference coolers!
It is nice that a company has paid attention and we have a solution that doesn't involve a series of carefully engineered zip ties...
A good PSU has a lot of primary caps inside to compensate this peaks without any problem. The question should better be: What's about the life-span of this caps under this conditions? This is one of the reasons to buy a PSU with good and not with so-called "bad" caps. If you buy cheap you buy twice...
But Nvidia is not much better. I've checked this in another article:
A good PSU has a lot of primary caps inside to compensate this peaks without any problem. The question should better be: What's about the life-span of this caps under this conditions?
But Nvidia is not much better. I've checked this in another article:
FormatC your avatar gave me cancer...
Ok, use 8x MSAA to prevent you before edge flares