AMD Radeon R9 290X Pro Reviews

We have to recommend the R9 290X as the best bang-for-buck card today, but with a caveat – if you are a hardcore gamer or a professional in need of a powerful GPU that will run much of the day, you really need a better cooler to make the most of your Hawaii GPU. Getting an aftermarket cooler is an option, but it’s probably best to wait for non-reference cards with custom coolers to roll out. In this case, they will be worth the premium.

AMD's claim the that the R9 290X is an "enthusiast configurable GPU" does have some merit though. I would agree that most users purchasing a $500+ graphics card will have a basic knowledge of the control panel and its settings. Gamers will be able to get some extra performance out of the R9 290X by simply increasing the maximum fan speed as long as they are comfortable with the increased sound levels. What you cannot do though is lower the maximum fan speed any lower than 40% to get a quieter solution than stock. With settings of 20% or 30%, the fan ignored my preference to maintain 95C at the 727 base clock. Hawaii appears to be pegged at that base level until AMD's partners can come up with quieter and more efficient cooling solutions.

So AMD has finally done it: a really fast single-GPU card capable of matching, and often besting, a Titan. Game on.

The AMD Radeon R9 290X reference card is a beast and was able take on an overclocked GeForce GTX 780 at 4K and come out victorious!

The AMD Radeon R9 290X didn’t have a flawless victory, but it won the majority of the benchmarks and outperformed more expensive offerings from NVIDIA. The Radeon R9 290X is the new champion for single-GPU desktop graphics cards!

So, should you pick a pair of R9 290Xs over a single GTX TITAN by shelling out $100 more? Only if you're willing to put up with a lot more noise, heat, and power-draw for 30% more performance, which does show potential to widen at EyeFinity resolutions. Watercooling could solve the noise issues, and benchmark enthusiasts with LN2 on tap could see things a whole lot differently.

AMD has put itself in a great position with the Radeon R9 290X based on the new Hawaii GPU. The R9 290X is faster than the GTX 780, just about on par with the GTX Titan, all while coming in at a price well under what NVIDIA has on the shelves today. It isn't perfect and the warts of noise, power, and heat will bother some. Still, users looking for a top performing single-GPU graphics card will find the R9 290X at the top of their list.

Finally! AMD's new Radeon R9 290X is here. After running the card through its paces, I have to say, I had mixed feelings about the card, and only when I heard the price was I sold, but first things first. The Radeon R9 290X is based on the new 28 nm "Hawaii" GPU which increases performance considerably over the previous generation. Averaged over our review benchmarks, we see an 18% performance improvement over the R9 280X / HD 7970 GHz Edition when using the "Quiet" BIOS and 24% when using the "Uber" BIOS. Quiet? Uber? Ahh, I see you skipped to the last page. The card comes with two BIOSes, which lets you pick between a BIOS with lower noise (2000 RPM fan max) called "Quiet" and the "Uber" BIOS that comes without a fan RPM limit, providing increased performance at the cost of more noise. Compared to NVIDIA's lineup, the R9 290X in "Quiet" mode is slightly faster than the GTX 780 and 5% slower than the GTX Titan. With the "Uber" BIOS, the card ends up a bit faster than the GTX Titan. At higher resolutions, like 2560x1600, we see the card outperform NVIDIA's offerings by another few percent. Pure performance is not everything. Nowadays, modern graphics cards are more limited by power, heat, and noise than anything else, and the R9 290X certainly cannot impress here. We measured typical gaming power consumption in the 240W-250W range, which is a good deal higher than the GTX Titan (210W) or GTX 690 (230W). Non-gaming power consumption is very high, too, and higher than previous products from AMD, far beyond what NVIDIA has to offer. Blu-ray power consumption, for example, is 78W! Comparable NVIDIA cards handle Blu-ray tasks with under 20W. Multi-monitor power consumption is similar, negatively affecting office users with multiple screens.

We're impressed with the R9 290X's performance and even more so with its price. AMD has finally given Nvidia a reason to discount its top tier products and that's enough to be grateful for. There's something to appreciate in watching healthy competition between two seasoned rivals. If you've been eyeing the Titan, it seems about time to pull the trigger, whether you take advantage of pending price cuts or settle for the R9 290X now.

For the money, it really feels like AMD is bringing more than just another video card that concentrates on pushing out a large amount of frames per seconds. For this reason, the new R series video cards stand out. We're sure that people are going to be excited to pick one up and see just how the new model goes on their own system. It's fairly safe to assume that NVIDIA is going to drop the price of the GTX 780 in the coming week or weeks, for one reason and one reason only. At $100 cheaper, they need to if they want to stay competitive. At $549, the R9 290X 4GB feels like the easier choice when compared against the GTX 780. Let's see what happens with the NVIDA offerings in the coming weeks, though.

It’s looking like neither NVIDIA nor AMD are going to let today’s launch set a new status quo. NVIDIA for their part has already announced a GTX 780 Ti for next month, and while we can only speculate on performance we certainly don’t expect NVIDIA to let the 290X go unchallenged. The bigger question is whether they’re willing to compete with AMD on price.

The first thing we need to talk about is the overclock we got. Like you probably are, we're disappointed with how high we got - or how high we didn't get. We really hope voltage adjustment gets thrown into the mix soon as it should really give the 290X more breathing room on the core. Considering this is something we've seen for many generations now, we find it hard to believe that it won't be coming with the next version of Afterburner. If it does show up, we'll be of course retesting the AMD R9 290X 4GB straight away. We've had the luck of testing CrossFire R9 290X 4GBs thanks to HIS; keep an eye for that in the next day or two. We won't be looking at the overclocking side of that just yet because we feel without the voltage adjustment option, the performance change won't be major, and it's ultimately going to be a waste of time. Again, though, if we do get voltage adjustment like I feel we will, then we'll be seeing just what we can get out of the single card solution and the Crossfire setup. We really look forward to seeing what a company like MSI does with the 290X. We hope they slap the Lightning tag on it and really give the card some more breathing room with their Military Class components and triple voltage overclocking option goodness. While at the moment the NVIDIA offerings allow much more overclocking headroom due to the ability to adjust the core voltage, the simple fact that this card remains $100 cheaper than the base GTX 780s means that it's just so attractive. For now, though, keep an eye out for our upcoming CrossFire article and we'll continue to keep our ear to the ground with the hope that the next version of MSI Afterburner really opens up these new AMD Radeon video cards.

An exceptionally quick card that can play the latest games at very high resolutions

In the spirit of getting massive performance at a substantial discount, then, I’m giving AMD’s Radeon R9 290X Tom’s Hardware’s Elite award—the first time a graphics card has received this honor, I believe, during my tenure. The decision was controversial. Nvidia still does thermals, acoustics, and aesthetics better. But now it’s also charging a hefty premium for those luxuries. AMD’s card is faster, cheaper, and it makes an effort to keep acoustics under control, so long as you stick with its Quiet mode. AMD reworked its approach to CrossFire and now has a more elegant solution that, while not perfect (we still measured dropped and runt frames in Skyrim, along with notable variance in other titles), does facilitate frame pacing right out of the gate at resolutions all the way up to 7680x1440. I’ll get more enthusiastic about the R9 290X if third-party designs start showing up with better cooling. Until then, it’d be downright negligent to not recognize this card’s class-leading performance at a price we paid for Radeon HD 7970 two years ago.

With the R9 290X, AMD has achieved something phenomenal. They have made extreme performance all that much more accessible to gamers by releasing a card that not only bucks current industry pricing trends but also looks towards the future with promising technologies Mantle and TrueAudio. Despite the fact that acoustics and power consumption may drag down the reference version in some respects, the R9 290X is a compelling enthusiast graphics card that has every right to brag about its supremacy.

Even if the upcoming GTX 780 Ti only gets close to the performance of the Radeon R9 290X, it could be an appealing alternative, given the free games that Nvidia is offering up with its cards. This time around, if you opt for AMD, you’ll have to pay for all your new games—no juicy game bundle here at launch. Games come and go, though; $500-plus video cards tend to endure. And the AMD Radeon R9 290X has all the making of a keeper.